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Chuck Griffith
Member
203 Posts |
 Posted - 08/22/2008 : 1:21:39 PM
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How many people are having problems with inventory Quantity-On-Hand inexplicably going out of sync?
We have a fair number of problems with this and it is always troubling because it leads one to question the integrity of employees. However, when the computer count goes below the shelf count it is impossible to think that employees are adding inventory to the selves.
I wrote a report that gathers all inventory transactions that are recorded for a particular SKU: sales, returns, adjustments and receiving. Today I ran that for an item where the computer said we had less than what was on the self (taking into account the sold-but-not-shipped quantity). The report agreed with what was on the shelf and disagreed with the QOH. That makes me wonder how much I can trust OM's inventory count. My analysis of this says that for this to be human error one would have to both mess up receiving (to get too many on the shelf) *and* mess up some orders to the exact same count (to get the OM inventory transactions to match it).
(Unfortunately, the report becomes useless for SKUs that have orders that are archived because sales and returns transactions are cleared.)
I know there are some actions that can mess up inventory such as Order: Revise Line item: "Change the Quantity Shipped" for an item out of stock; followed by a cancel of the line (which causes inventory to go up from zero and there is no record of this QOH change). But these things are hard to find even by accident and it is not our usual method of business to use those actions.
Inventory is so important because it is real money. Because it is that important I wish the next revamp of the inventory system would have an audit trail for every change to QOH. This might enable one to track down what was going on when the inventory goes out of whack.
Anybody else having enough problems with this to feel the need for something to track the causes down?
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ndeed
Senior Member
USA
955 Posts |
Posted - 08/22/2008 : 1:42:06 PM
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Some quick Questions that may help other help you:
What version are you on?
How many users?
What access version is on all stations?
For ourselves,, we had some inventory count issues with one version... (was a nightmare!)
But since that has been fixed. Count errors can usually be tracked to user errors at receiving or employees adjusting inventory when they have not allocated for what has not shipped yet. |
Nathan
Access Versions: Mixture of 2000-SP3 and 2003-SP2
4.412,5.003,5.012,5.503
Running SEOM Ver. 5.505 POS |
Edited by - ndeed on 08/22/2008 1:46:42 PM |
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Nabil B
Member
USA
185 Posts |
Posted - 08/23/2008 : 11:43:03 PM
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We are using 5.507 and we have one documented inceident where the POS crashed, the item was taken out of inventory, but the order was sitting there empty. This item's QOH of one just vanished. there was no record of it whatsoever. We knew it was there because it came up at the POS before crashing, and because the item was there for the customer to buy. we had to adjust the QOH back up to sell the item.
viewing the crashed POS the order it was empty, and there was no history info for the reduction of inventory on that item.
An incident like this would make your QOH be more than what is on the shelf.
Also, if anyone messes with the multi record editor, there will be no record of the changes what so ever and you will never know what happened or who did it.
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Nabil B
Order Mgr 5/2007
5.609+POS for 2007/ Access 2003 SP3+hotfix |
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ndeed
Senior Member
USA
955 Posts |
Posted - 08/25/2008 : 10:55:23 AM
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Yes, a run time error at POS or Manual can mess up inventory.
For as multi-record, I limit all employees (but myself) from having access to this feature.
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Nathan
Access Versions: Mixture of 2000-SP3 and 2003-SP2
4.412,5.003,5.012,5.503
Running SEOM Ver. 5.505 POS |
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lea-ann
Senior Member
USA
619 Posts |
Posted - 08/25/2008 : 12:15:01 PM
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| Hi: we've has the computer crash during a POS sale also. It would be nice if the system could recognize the crash and recover the sales data from the POS temp table it is being held in. Lea-Ann |
Lea-Ann
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Nabil B
Member
USA
185 Posts |
Posted - 08/25/2008 : 2:41:52 PM
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quote:
[For as multi-record, I limit all employees (but myself) from having access to this feature.]
The problem is that there is no equivilant feature that leaves an audit trail. We cary thousands of products with constant vendor price changes (random, not a constant percentage or dollar amount)and the multi record editor is the only option to multi edit.
And when we started using the program we had no idea this feature was un-auditable, so I allowed a few other employees to use it. Now it is hard to say NO, and have them do things the hard way, one record at a time.
I would like this feature to have an audit trail.
And for the sake of new users, this feature should be de-activated by default with big warnings about the unavilalbitly of any audit trails. |
Nabil B
Order Mgr 5/2007
5.609+POS for 2007/ Access 2003 SP3+hotfix |
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Barney Stone
Administrator
USA
5517 Posts |
Posted - 08/26/2008 : 4:03:40 PM
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| Starting with the next Beta release, there will be an option to create a note whenever the data in one or more fields is changed at the Multi Record Editor. The note will include the field name and old and new contents for each field that was edited. |
Barney Stone, President
Stone Edge Technologies, Inc.
610-994-3699 ext. 111 |
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Nabil B
Member
USA
185 Posts |
Posted - 08/27/2008 : 11:25:32 AM
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Thank you for your responsiveness Barney. This should help tighten things up quite a bit.
Will the notes be on the product Inventory screen?
Would also be nice to add a note when a manual QOH change is done, then we can audit that product. Hopefully eventually you can add a History Tab, that will show changes from all sources with who was logged in at the time, and the date: Multi Record Editor, Manual QOH changes, Web Sales, Manual Sales, POS, Returns, Receiving. Then when inventory on an item is off, we can really get to the bottom of it. |
Nabil B
Order Mgr 5/2007
5.609+POS for 2007/ Access 2003 SP3+hotfix |
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susan_stone19
Starting Member
4 Posts |
Posted - 08/28/2008 : 2:45:01 PM
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| We are concerned that there is no audit trail (or at least we are not aware of one) for returned items when "Discard" or "Vendor" are selected. How does selecting either of these choices in the Returns process effect inventory values? |
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mckane
Member
193 Posts |
Posted - 08/29/2008 : 07:22:10 AM
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Chuck -
We too deal with the QOH getting out of synch. We constantly have to count inventory - cycle counting.
We have thousands of products so it's virtually impossible to pin point where there were issues and when. 5.607 has been bad for us in this regard. I have no idea why, but we've been dealing with about triple the amount of differing QOH's on the shelf since we upgraded to this version. I have no way of knowing what is causing it, if it's human error or software errors. And I don't know if it's because we upgraded or if they have nothing to do with eachother.
We initially had tons of crashes and issues when we upgraded to 5.607. I suppose it's possible that tons of stuff got out of synch at that time, and we're still dealing with the repercussions of that. I just don't know. Or maybe it's just coincidence with the timing.
This is certainly one area where I too would love to have a better audit trail.
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AtomicHG
New Member
USA
39 Posts |
Posted - 08/29/2008 : 9:37:46 PM
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| We have been unable to pin point the issue as of yet, but yes there are some. One issue is we find Order Manager posts items to inventory from purchase orders before the purchase orders are received (seems to happen with few suppliers). Second issue is just unknown, we just have items that qty is off. We try to cycle count the entire warehouse weekly, but that is very hard to do. We do very little phone sales, all web imports. Very few people have ability to work with inventory qty. That reason is why I believe something in code/query is wrong. I would be more than happy to have stone edge put some custom code to track all inventory changes so we can try to solve this dilemma. |
Thanks,
Jon @
Atomic Enterprises, INC. |
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Barney Stone
Administrator
USA
5517 Posts |
Posted - 09/02/2008 : 08:29:59 AM
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| Sounds like we really need a way to track all inventory changes. I will add that to my To Do list. Note that it will not be able to track changes made directly in the Inventory table, either manually or by some other program that you have interfaced with our data, unless you are using the Enterprise Version and SQL Server. |
Barney Stone, President
Stone Edge Technologies, Inc.
610-994-3699 ext. 111 |
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mckane
Member
193 Posts |
Posted - 09/03/2008 : 03:41:57 AM
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My gut tells me (just guessing here)... that there is a problem with the web importer. I think that, for whatever reason, it doesn't pull out items from qty when it should, and it pulls out items that it shouldn't. I don't have proof of this, other than the fact that we have serious reoccurring QOH issues. There are too many to pin down to just human error. It's got to be a systematic thing and it definitely got worse when we upgraded to 5.60X. The previous version we ran 5.0 had some issues but not like we are now experiencing.
Does anyone have any ideas on how we could verify this?
Perhaps we could have a trigger log everything that happens to the Inventory table for a day. Then, we could compare it with sales data for individual skus?
I really don't know.
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Sean Frank
Member
USA
154 Posts |
Posted - 01/01/2009 : 7:45:35 PM
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We have the same problem and it is a PITA. We had to right special reports to compare On Order QTY to Expected and Received records. The phantom inventory issues was causing product not to get ordered on anto PO generation because the On Order QTY was not up to date with the Expected and Received tables for the PO records (they operate in two different tables I think).
Without any audit trail we are totally blind.
What Barney describes above would fill a major hole in the SEOM process IMHO. |
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Erik-RMC
New Member
12 Posts |
Posted - 06/10/2009 : 11:09:13 AM
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| Our inventory is constantly off. It nice to know we are not crazy. We use 5.803 slightly modified for Vista and Volusion. There is a feature to see what has been done to the inventory but it seems to not be working. |
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Sean Franklin
Senior Member
USA
828 Posts |
Posted - 06/10/2009 : 2:07:07 PM
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| POS is a huge issue for inventory errors. Now running 5.612, we do get frequent POS crashes (perhaps 1 transaction in 50) and on certain items I can see inventory errors as a result. This becomes a HUGE issue on Road Shows, where we have a limited inventory and all transactions run through POS. I ran over 700 sales in 5 days last week on POS and still haven't worked out all the errors. |
Sean Franklin
http://www.CycleGadgets.com
Toll Free 877-7GADGET (877-742-3438) |
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ChicagoTS
New Member
USA
28 Posts |
Posted - 06/15/2009 : 4:48:22 PM
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| Any solutions here? I'm running 5.612 (just went live) and I'm already finding QOH errors. Is there an audit trail for QOH adjustments? This was a huge reason for buying an "Order Management/Inventory" tool... |
______________________
CTS
Dean Brady
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superdetail
Junior Member
51 Posts |
Posted - 06/17/2009 : 5:39:47 PM
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I have been complaining about this for years. I have spent countless hours, compiled all the proof necessary to show the discrepancies, but still I was called crazy for claiming that that SEOM doesn't keep an accurate count.
"It must be user error" they said.
I gave up, now we use the order manager to estimate our inventory, and take physical counts when necessary. It's too bad, really. |
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shimshee
Member
232 Posts |
Posted - 06/17/2009 : 11:50:23 PM
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| I sell only expensive units and thus have low inventory counts(we might only have of each sku at a time and exact counts are extremely important. I have found numerous errors(we are off by a quantity of 1-3, on about 15% of inventory)with SEOM that I have since started keeping tracking of inventory with another small database. I really like SEOM but this issue is very very annoying and vexing. We never touch the QOH in the actual tables and yet we are still off. |
Edited by - shimshee on 06/17/2009 11:53:01 PM |
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shimshee
Member
232 Posts |
Posted - 06/17/2009 : 11:53:32 PM
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quote:
[i]Originally posted by shimshee[/i]
[br]I sell only expensive units and thus have low inventory counts(we might only have 50 of each sku at a time and exact counts are extremely important. I have found numerous errors(we are off by a quantity of 1-3, on about 15% of inventory)with SEOM that I have since started keeping tracking of inventory with another small database. I really like SEOM but this issue is very very annoying and vexing. We never touch the QOH in the actual tables and yet we are still off.
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kevin
Administrator
USA
2405 Posts |
Posted - 06/19/2009 : 10:01:09 AM
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I will need a call on this...
A recent issue was corrected in the POS System that did not handle kit part inventory correctly when building quotes. This has been resolved in the latest beta release. Other than this, I am not aware of any other issues with QOH management throughout the program.
For those who experience run-time errors in the system, inventory tracking could definately be affected as well as a number of other systems. Code execution halts at the point of the error - whether inventory related or not, therefore, the remaining code is never touched. If the code that was skipped was meant to handle inventory or some other function, that action does not take place. I would review the ErrorLog table in the Order Manager to get an idea of where errors are occurring and how frequently they arise.
An inventory auditing system is on the development schedule for 2010 along with multi-location inventory tracking capabilities. Currently, PA-DSS Certification is taking priority through Q3. |
Kevin Smith
Stone Edge Technologies, Inc.
920 Germantown Pike
Suite 112
Plymouth Meeting, PA 19462
610-994-3699 x112
kevin at stoneedge dot com |
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kevin
Administrator
USA
2405 Posts |
Posted - 06/23/2009 : 2:06:35 PM
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| Calls? Anyone? |
Kevin Smith
Stone Edge Technologies, Inc.
920 Germantown Pike
Suite 112
Plymouth Meeting, PA 19462
610-994-3699 x112
kevin at stoneedge dot com |
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secondlap
New Member
9 Posts |
Posted - 06/29/2009 : 1:23:47 PM
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| I would love to call tech support; unfortunately I used all my tech support hours to fix issues with SEOM(this one in particular)and now I have to spend an additional $400.00 to be able to call tech support and download updates. So no calls from me; anyone else upset over this issue. |
Edited by - secondlap on 06/29/2009 1:25:43 PM |
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kevin
Administrator
USA
2405 Posts |
Posted - 06/30/2009 : 10:14:48 AM
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Issues that are determined to be bug related are not applied against your support contract. Issues that arise from corrupt data, configuration problems or hardware/sofware issues outside of the scope of the Order Manager that are corrected by our tech support group are applicable to your support time. I am sorry that you feel that we have not addressed your problem sufficiently. I'll be happy to discuss the specifics in your case. Please contact me directly.
I have already reviewed one user's situation where the Order Manager recorded hundreds of run-time errors in the same location for over three years. Yes, the run-time error is a bug, however, the lack of any action on the part of the customer to report the problem to our technical support to have the bug corrected in a timely manner led to the inventory problems they were experiencing. Proper employee training to report error conditions is critical in dabase driven applications! Ignorance of run-time errors will lead to long term data instability - guaranteed!
While I'd like to think we make every effort to provide solid software, I also understand that we cannot test every condition based on every possible combination of parameter settings that are possible in the Order Manager. This is why we rely on our users to provide immediate feedback should problems arise. Had this user reported the problems they were experiencing back in 2006, their inventory problems would not have grown to the level of exasperation offered on this forum thread.
Keep in mind that this was only one user's situation - it does not reflect on the rest of the users who have posted concerns regarding inventory control. Without reviewing each user's case individually, I cannot provide more insight as to the cause of the discrepancies. Again, I will ask for cooperation from those who feel the Order Manager does not maintain accurate inventory. Can you please contact me directly so that I may review your specific circumstances to attempt identification of the problem?
Thank you...
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Kevin Smith
Stone Edge Technologies, Inc.
920 Germantown Pike
Suite 112
Plymouth Meeting, PA 19462
610-994-3699 x112
kevin at stoneedge dot com |
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Sean Frank
Member
USA
154 Posts |
Posted - 07/07/2009 : 11:02:19 PM
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Barney or Kevin,
when Barney says "Starting with the next Beta release, there will be an option to create a note whenever the data in one or more fields is changed at the Multi Record Editor. The note will include the field name and old and new contents for each field that was edited" Can you tell me if this feature will be in the 5.8xx version now in BETA ??
I hope so.... The biggest hole in the SEOM system is not being able to track ALL inventory adjustments. We need to see:
Adjustment date/time
Adjustment QTY
New total QOH
User who made it
It would be good to see what computer the employee was logged in on (box network ID or IP)
Process associated with adjustment (PO being received or item allocating to an order or manual adjustment etc etc).
With this info we could have full visibility of our inventory movement whereas now we have to make way too many assumptions.
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Sean
ENT SEOM 5.9
W2K3 SQL 2005
XP Access 2003 and 2007 boxes |
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kevin
Administrator
USA
2405 Posts |
Posted - 07/08/2009 : 08:20:04 AM
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Hello Sean,
Inventory revisions are slated for early 2010. An inventory auditing system will be added at that time. |
Kevin Smith
Stone Edge Technologies, Inc.
920 Germantown Pike
Suite 112
Plymouth Meeting, PA 19462
610-994-3699 x112
kevin at stoneedge dot com |
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Inventory count
