Skip to main content

Hello,

 

I’m trying to figure out what would be the best approach to identify parts that are eligible for discontinuation.  Basically I’m looking for parts that have very low sales over the last couple of years.

 

What tools or methods does everyone recommend here?


I saw there was a slow moving parts report in planning but the results didn’t make sense to me.

 

Thank you,

 

Matt

I think this becomes a multiple step process to arrive at a useful answer, it actually requires an ongoing process to come close to managing it well.  There are two possible items to be discontinued - items in inventory you no longer want to stock because they aren’t moving and items listed as sales parts that you no longer want to sell.  In both instances, you really are starting from the inventory transactions history to find a target group that hasn’t had a transaction in the last x number months.  You could start with a grouped search of all of the parts that have had some movement in the last period of interest - 1 year or 2 years and use that as the control group for items to exclude.  Once you have this list, you could then compare that to all items with inventory QOH from the Inventory Part In Stock overview and find the items that don’t appear in your control group.  You could also do a similar search or comparison against sales parts to decide if there are existing sales parts you want to inactivate because they are not in the control group.  Most of this analysis would end up being comparisons done in Excel outside of IFS.  This is what I would term as the user based approach to doing this analysis.

The next level of reviewing this would require SQL writing ability and access through the SQL Query Tool or similar programming level access.  For that level, I would run the Aggregate Inventory Transactions per Period function in IFS, then use the SQL Query Tool to analyze the resulting aggregated history information in the INVENTORY_PART_PERIOD_HIST table to find items that have had no Issues or Receipts over the periods of interest.

There really isn’t an out of the box report or function that I’ve found that makes this easy or straightforward.  Maybe someone knows something I’m not aware of, so will interested to see if there are other replies.