This article is relevant if you need to get control to optimize your NetSuite inventory counting practices.
Background
One way we can assess our clients’ business maturity is their ability to maintain a trustworthy perpetual inventory system. While seemingly straightforward, maintaining an inventory depends on the management’s commitment and the practices employed in inventory control.
An inventory cycle count program is often used to help frequently count items on hand in an ongoing fashion — in contrast to the major annual inventory count. There are many ways to implement a cycle count program.
NetSuite’s Inventory Count record is very helpful in the process as it supports a snapshot feature to capture what the inventory was at a specific time allowing comparative information to what is in the retail store or warehouse.
While the record structure is helpful, gathering item count information can vary greatly depending on the environment and available tools.
A client in the jewelry business needed an optimized gathering mechanism to save time and increase the frequency they would count their highly valuable inventory assets.
Using NetSuite SuiteLets to Optimize Inventory Counts
Early this year, I discussed how we created an Excel-based item batch counting practice with enhanced NetSuite tools.
Our jewelry client had different ideas for capturing the inventory counts. We ended up creating a custom SuiteLet-driven application that offered these critical capacities:
- Auto Generate Count Scope: instead of using NetSuite’s method of generating an inventory count record, we streamlined the process for how the client wanted to work in each of their stores. Hence, we could easily shape the record scope according to the desired practice.
- Optimized Scanning with Latent Validation: scanning is often used to help reduce errors and speed up the process. But if NetSuite is validating every scan, the process is slowed. Instead, we allowed for very rapid scanning, and when finished, we only then validated the item via a single (batch-based) lookup. This dramatically increased the speed and the user experience.
- Multiple Item Lookup Fields: our client had items tagged in different, non-uniform ways. Thus they scanned any code representing the item, and we did the lookups (latently). Yes, we can look the product up by the Item ID. And we could also look up by UPC and serial number. The client was elated as they did not have items organized and tagged with uniform identifiers.
- Batch Mode and Controls: In some cases, the client had inventory in containers (secured drawers), and they knew the number of items that should be counted and validated. The idea is that they wanted to enter the number of items in each container ahead of time, rapidly scan (as discussed above), and double check they didn’t miss any items.
Optimized Inventory Count Video Demonstration (4:07)
Boban D., a Technical Manager in our Practice, created a short demonstration (4:07) of the application he designed and developed for our client.
Drive NetSuite to Save Time and Costs
Our client assesses they saved about 70% of time and costs using the custom inventory count application. Isn’t this the real purpose of software? Software strategically deployed should help generate more revenue and lower costs to drive more profit. That means those savings can be used to hire more people and invest in new products and services — the world is a better place.
If you found this article relevant, feel free to sign up for notifications to new articles as I post them. Our model makes all our algorithms available to our clients without a license charge. Hence, if this count application inspires you to optimize your inventory management practices, let’s have a conversation.
Marty Zigman
Holding all three official certifications, Marty is regarded as the top NetSuite expert and leads a team of senior professionals at Prolecto Resources, Inc. He is a former Deloitte & Touche CPA and has held CTO roles. For over 30 years, Marty has produced leadership in ERP, CRM and eCommerce business systems. Contact Marty to set up a conversation.
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