We are a manufacturing company with a small line of products that we warrant and support after the sale. We have been struggling with our service department shipping inventory for warranty claims that production was relying on for upcoming jobs, causing production delays.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to manage this conflict. We have considered separate warehouses however we only have one physical warehouse. And we would like to avoid excessive inventory bloat. Would safety stock be helpful in the situation rather then just minimum on hand quantities? We are using MRP and have minimum on hand quantities set but haven’t found a good way to keep a few extra parts in inventory to satisfy warranty needs. Any tips or best practice suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
That’s a really hard problem to solve, and just software isn’t going to fix the problem. It’s mostly going to be a company policy enforcement coupled with proper scheduling. If either of those isn’t working, you’ll get hosed.
If your sales guy knows that he can walk out the floor and grab the physical part, it can be tough to stop him.
With the assumption that your company is making everything to stock, this is a tough problem to solve. Separation of inventory through warehouse separation is not a bad idea. Is your upcoming jobs in the schedule? If then you could allocate materials to those jobs protecting your inventory.
It’s good to know this isn’t an unfamiliar problem. With some of the inventory issues we have had, we start wondering if we are missing something completely in epicor. @JayKrishna our jobs are on the schedule and we had looked at allocating material for them awhile ago, but at the time (not sure why any more) considered it unhelpful. i am going to revisit the idea of allocating material for scheduled jobs. Thinking about this again, I am sure we would benefit overall with some good policy in place and allocating material.
Thank you