Lead Times and Locations

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20.3.7 Analysing Stock

Have a look at the effect of these operations on stock management. There are several ways of viewing stocks: • from the Product form, • from the Locations, • from the Orders, • from the Reporting menu. Open the Product form from the menu Warehouse → Product → Products and look at the list of items. You will immediately see the following information about the products: • Real Stock, • Virtual Stock. If you want more information, you can use the actions to the right of the form. If you click the report Stock Level Forecast , OpenERP opens a graphical view of the stock levels for the selected products changing with time over the days and weeks to come. To get the stock levels by location use the button Stock by Location. OpenERP then gives you the stock of this product for all its possible locations. If you only want to see the physical locations in your company just filter this list using the Location Type Internal. By default, physical locations are already in red to better distinguish them from the other locations. Consolidated or View locations the sum of several locations, following the hierarchical structure are displayed in blue. Figure 20.13: Stock quantities by location for a given product You can get more details about all the Stock Moves or Future Stock Moves from the product form. You will then see each move from a source location to a destination location. Everything that influences stock levels corresponds to a stock move. You could also look at the stocks available in a location using the menu Inventory Control → Locations Structure . You can select the locations for which you want to see the hierarchy by clicking the drop-down list. Click a location to look at the stocks by product a wizard appears. A location containing child locations shows the consolidated contents for all of its child locations. 262 You should now check the product quantities for various locations to familiarize yourself with this double-entry stock management system. You should look at: • supplier locations to see how goods receipts are linked, • customer locations to see how packing notes are linked, • inventory locations to see the accumulated profit and loss, • production locations to see the value created for the company. Also look at how the real and virtual stocks depend on the location selected. If you enter a supplier location: • the real stock shows all of the product receipts coming from this type of supplier, • the virtual stock takes into account the quantities expected from these suppliers + real stock + quantities expected from these suppliers. It is the same scheme for customer locations and production locations. From the Reporting have a look at the Dashboard and the Analysis Reports, such as Inventory Analysis and Moves Analysis. The filters allow you to see for instance the current and future stock, for all locations or for a given location. You can use Extended Filters and the Group by functionality to create your own reporting.

20.4 Basic Logistics Configuration

In this section you will see how to configure stock management to match your company’s needs. OpenERP can handle many different situations by configuring it to behave as required.

20.4.1 Stock Locations

You have seen in the preceding sections that the whole of stock management is built on a concept of stock locations. Locations are structured hierarchically to account for the subdivision of a warehouse into sections, aisles, andor cupboards. The hierarchical view also enables you to structure virtual locations such as production counterparts. That gives you a finer level of analysis. Use the menu Warehouse → Configuration → Warehouse Management → Locations then click New to define new locations. Figure 20.14: Defining a Stock Location You should then give a name to your stock location. Now look at the location types.