Inventory Count common practices

Hi @dpat ,

We used to freeze inventory at our warehouses and perform a count over weekend once a quarter but we decided a few years ago to do away with this process and adapt a continuous cycle counting process.  The continuous cycle counting for us is as inventory locations change a count is performed of that location to verify what’s in IFS against the location.  For us this is working and we haven’t actually froze our inventory at a warehouse to perform a count in several years.

Regards,

William Klotz

@william.klotz , Thanks for your input.  I agree that is a workaround.  I think we may certainly look into that as the impact of an inventory freeze becomes more and more unbearable.

How was management’s response to the cycle count process vs a physical inventory check?  Do the cycle counts results get passed to leadership and are there cross-checks or is it done by different departments?  

Just wondering, thanks in adv!  

Hi @dpat ,

The change from freezing inventory and counting to cycle counting was actually driven by leadership because of the amount of time we had to freeze inventory to perform counts.   Cycle count information is provided to leadership weekly as a summary of the previous week.  When we moved to cycle counts we formed a team of individuals whose sole job was to perform cycle counting so we didn’t impact our pickers.   The cycle counting team updates count information in IFS and provides details to warehouse supervisors who roll up the information into the weekly report for leadership.

Regards,

William Klotz

Hi Dpat, 

Just like many businesses we used to complete the dreaded Annual Stock Count but since our IFS Implemention in 2016 we have incorporated Cyclic Counting into our warehouse business standard practises. 

We use the advanced Cyclic Counting scheduling function across all 14 Warehouses within our business. Within the scheduling function and depending on product type we apply the relevant parameters to each schedule created, for example, only count parts that haven't been counted within a particular time frame such as last 30 days. Along side this we would determine the amount of records we want to complete a check on for any given report. 

Depending on when resource is best available and utilised, the timing of the counts are critical for a smooth turnaround of count and approval. We check all of our scheduled lines throughout the night, or early in the morning. This would be very dependant on your business but we analysed this as part of our Counting Strategy. 

All result approvals (if required) are completed by Senior Supervisors but are limited by a Value and Count Deviation as stated in our Strategy. Large stock loss and value approvals can only be approved by senior management. Unfortunately IFS can't determine approval limits to User Profiles. (At least I'm not aware of this)

Counting Performance Reporting is completed and presented monthly to Management but generally any losses are quantified and understood way in advance of this meeting. This would also include positive counting as this still indicates a potential failure somewhere within the system. 

All in all using the Cyclic Counting Scheduling Functionality within IFS has enabled us to count more frequently, more accurately with minimal cost and disruption to operations. 

Hope this helps 

Thanks 

Kev

Hello, 

Just curious if any of you schedule your cycle counts using IFS? Or are you generating manually? We also do not want to freeze inventory, but want to be able to schedule. We are considering something similar to a warehouse inventory report set up as a count sheet, but batch scheduling is missing a few recurrence patterns we’d like to use (mainly quarterly). 

@Kev458 , @william.klotz , @dpat I am finding this thread really useful as I was going through the forum for counting best practices to help with our upcoming annual counting. Thank You

I second @LPHILLIPS ‘s question. For me to understand how cycle counting works, I am trying to learn the setup to be used in IFS. Can one of you share any documentation with regards to the setup you used in IFS? I would be really grateful. 

Hi @LPHILLIPS ,

It is set up per each inventory part in Inventory Part record, by enabling the part for cycle counting, and specifying the interval for the counting.

Thanks,

@ThushAsanka , what does your scheduled cycle count report selection look like?  If I only want to count 10 parts per count report based on a 30 day cycle interval however I have 50 part numbers in the interval, will I get 10 more the next day or what?  I am new to the inventory cycle count set up.  

There are a variety of other options when scheduling the Count Report too...

Run the Inventory Cleanup task too if you need parts clearing out from the Count where zero in stock and haven’t moved for x days

LInda 

​@PRODQ any options I should consider if we have long-running count reports? We have some very problematic commodity group 2 values with nested handling units that take a good long while to run.

Maybe schedule them to run / create “out of hours”?

We already did that, still had a group run for 16 hours (I created a thread for this, my boss just advised chiming in here as well).

We are using invetentory sampling procedure. That means, statistical methods are used to select the sample inventory locations to be counted. The method is based on inventory on hand and inventory transactions within a specific period to evaluate the sample. Thsi is done with the help of INVENT EXPERT, which is certified by our auditors.

This massively reduces the effort for counting procedures and the number of items to be counted.