Inventory Management System

Introduction

An inventory can be defined as something like a warehouse. A warehouse contains the physical goods and an inventory contains track of all those goods (ware house may have 100 sugar packets, but in inventory, it is 100 in front of sugar). A warehouse contains all the goods, items and everything needed to serve the affected people and the relief workers. All the records about items in the inventory can be stored, monitored and managed using the Inventory Management Module. Data handled in this module is frequently used by other modules, therefore a thorough knowledge of this module is important.

Getting started with Inventory Management

Click on the Inventory Management menu item in the main menu and then the Inventory Management menu with its home page will appear.

Inventory Management menu

Inventory Management Main Menu

Home

This link conventionally directs the user to the Inventory Management Home

Search

Using this menu item,the user can search for a particular inventory or an item in the inventory.User is first directed to select the searching type(inventory/item) then according to that selection,next steps are appeared.Searching a item as same as described in the catalog section but for a inventory it is slightly different.

Inventory search can be done in two ways.search by location or search by name as well as search can be done with both. moreover search can be achieved by inventory owners details.(inventory owner means the head of the warehouse/inventory).

  • Search button 1 only considers inventory name and inventory location. If end user leaves the inventory name field as blank the result will give you the all available inventories located in the selected location. On the other hand the end user can search an inventory by only typing the inventory name and inventory name search is soundex searching enabled.
  • Search button 2 only considers the inventory-owners details. That could be inventory owner's name, address, contact number , email, etc ……. Searching by inventory-owner's details is also enabled soundex searching.
  • Therefore the Inventory search depends on the search button you click on and if you click on the Search button 1 , it doesn't care about the “Inventory- Owner” text area and if you click on the search button 2, it doesn't care about the Inventory Name text field and Inventory Location drop down menus.

In order to search by inventory location, enter the inventory name and location of the inventory .click on first search button(page contains 2 search buttons).Please don't fill other fields(search by inventory owner fields) because it will give unexpected results.The result will be the searched inventory's all details.

For searching with the inventory owners details, enter owners detail(name/email/address…) and click on the second search button

Inventories

With this link, user can add an new inventory to the system as well as edit information about of inventories , add items to the inventory also.

Register a New Inventory : Click on the Add Inventory button and the user will be prompted to enter the details of the new inventory.

In next window , enter the detail of the new inventory such as its location,contact information (This is information about the in charge of the inventory),the facilities available in the inventory(how many vehicles,warehouse area…..) and then click on next.

Then the user will be directed to mark the location of the inventory in a map.In this case, there are two ways of marking the inventory on the map

  • Directly using latitude and longitude if the user know them and click on next button

  • Zooming and marking on the given map (more details) and then click next.

Just bellow the add inventory section, the existing inventories can be seen.With this table, the user can edit the information about a inventory,send email to the head of the inventory, add items to inventories.

by clicking edit inventory or name of the inventory, the user will be navigated to the same place which is described in Register new inventory section.After changing the suitable fields ,click on the save button to apply the changes or if the user want to delete the inventory, click on delete button with knowing that all data of the inventory will be lost.With close button user can come to the page where he left off.

In oder to add an item to a inventory,click on the add item link.This action will directs the user to select the catalogs/categories/classifications as described in catalog module then click on next button.The first text box is already filled and amount means how much of the particular item is going to be added (200 kg from sugar :just put 200 in the text box).According to the previous selections, appropriate unit type appear and select it.Fill the cost of one unit (cost of sugar 1kg) and others details also(make sure to select the inventory).Supplier organization is the organization which supples those item (organization must be registered with sahana,if such one exists).finally click on submit

Add/List items

Clicking on this menu item,the user can see the available items,their quantity and inventory as well as the user is allowed to edit the information of a certain item or delete it by using the edit and delete links.edit link will prompt the user to the same place described in add item section above and the button Add item also

There is important feature with this menu item is that it allows user to transfer inventory items between inventories,shelters,organizations and victims.In order to use this feature, click on the send item button ,then the user will be directed to chose what item is required to send (by choosing,catalog,catagory…catalog) and fill the form after click in send link with appropriate data and click on send button.The alternate item table shows what are the items the user can send as an alternative for the required item.(cause field means that the reason for item transfer). For receiving items sent by another inventory, just click on the transit item button and the user can see the received items then click on received link allow user to accept items.Fill the authorized person text box by typing the name of the person who is responsible to accept the items and click on received button.

Re-Order Level

Re-Order Level menu item has some important functionality because it allows users to check about the items which should be reordered because existing amount is not sufficient for serving the disasters.When this link is clicked, the user can see the items which should be reordered and as well as the user can add reorder levels for the items in inventories.

By clicking on the edit link, user can edit the reorder level of that item.Add the new reorder level and just click on submit button.The delete link allows user to delete the item from the reorder list.

Re-Order level home page a button called Add Re-Order Level and this button provide facilities to add a new reorder level to an particular item.First select the catalogs/categories and the user will be directed to the same page where the user meets when he/she click on edit link .Do the same thing and click on submit.

Reporting sub menu

NOTE : all the reports can be viewed as PDF ODS or XHTML format.

Expired Items This menu items shows the user about expired items in inventories and by clicking on destroy item link,the user can destroy the item from the inventory.

Destroyed Items These are the items destroyed by from the inventories due to various reasons.

Re-Order Level Various re order levels of the items

Transit items These are the information about the items exchanged between inventories/shelters/…

Optimization sub menu

This sub menu basically provide facilities to conducts various levels of configurations for the Inventory Management System.

Set Alternate

Using this menu item, the user can select an item which can be treated as an alternate.For an example, bread can be used as alternate for rice.But make sure that the item you are going to use as an alternate should match with the requirements of the item which needs an alternate(sugar can not use as rice).So first select the item from catalogs/categories and then the relevant inventory, then the system will provide suitable items.Click on the alternate link in order to use it as an alternate to the previously selected item.

Set Relation

User can select interrelated item (sugar and tea/milk are interrelated)using this link and it works as same way described above.Finally click on the relate link in order to mark it as a related item to the selected item.

Prediction by Item

Sahana disaster management system can predict the status of the particular item with using past knowledge of the transactions happened in the inventories.First select the item by passing through catalogs and categories then fill the given form by choosing appropriate options.Prediction type is,the action you are going to predict(if sent selected,system provide predicted amount of the item which may be want to send in future) and the Time period is the time the user want to predict (if 5 is the input,system will predict for 5 days).Finally, user can get the monthly report or daily report/weekly reports according to the prediction.If the user click on customized reports ,he/she can see a chart about the prediction.Item Prediction part only predicts one period ahead. The period could be 1 day, 1 week , 2 months etc..

Prediction by Inventory

This menu item is also work same as the previous item except this predicts about inventories as a whole.the process is same .Just follow the instructions and you will get the answers.


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