My company (my 9-5 job that doesn’t use Epicor), just did a physical inventory, and the net change in value was astonishingly small.
On an inventory value of $2.7M, over 3,632 parts with a non-zero QOH, there was only a variance of $984.
Does that sound too good to be true?
LOL - Yes, Yes it does 
However, if you have a dedicated material handling group that is attentive to detail, it can be done. Glad to hear that it went so well for you.
Yes it does! JUST WOW!!! 
Nicely Done Calvin.
Well, if your last previous Full Physical Inventory was, like February 1, it might be possible.
The reason I doubt our count accuracy, is because production folks are constantly coming to me an my engineers asking, “Do you have any part xyz… ? System says we have 20 but no one can locate them.”
Ours this year too! Hard for the counts to be off when you have no inventory left!
#DueToCovid #CovidSucks
Yeah - that means that Physical is wrong, or at least warrants some serious auditing.
That “qoute” was an example of what happens throughout the year, not what was happening during Physical Inventory.
Maybe things are better than I expected (but still have my doubts), as we do haphazard cycle counts fairly often. But I can’t really tell how much those are, as the ERP system we use doesn’t have codes for Inventory Adjustments. So you can’t tell the reason why an inventory adjustment was done. An Inv Adj may have been for when an engineer signs out a part to use for R&D, building a fixture, etc… Or it may have been for discrepancy found during a cycle count. Or even when scrapping material.
Our MRP system is an incredibly low-end system. It’s so old that is uses a FoxPro “DB” (a file based system). I had to setup an old WinXP box just to connect to it via ODBC, so I can query it.
ok, maybe not wrong but I would still consider it suspect… Everyone does things differently of course, and while we’re all on Epicor (except you 
), we all know that it’s not the software but the execution of inventory controls that yields the results - good or bad.
Haphazard cycle counts are better than none. Even a major push to clean up the week before physical inventory is better than nothing. In your case where you cannot see the adjustments, I agree that it’s almost impossible to tell if things are good or not. But - If the physical inventory process was done by the rules, and the auditors are happy with it, then I might not worry about it too much. Maybe this was just a ‘good year’.
And what is this ancient software you speak of? LOL!
(I go waaaayyy back. Did my time with FoxPro and a handful of others back in the 80’s)
It’s called Alere. The current version (which we’re on) does support SQL. We even had a project to switch to that. Conversions and testing all went smooth. Then on the first day of being live on the SQL version, things started popping up. We had no choice but to go back to the FoxPro version.
FWIW - My first introduction to Epicor was when I started at a company using Vista 4 - which was FoxPro based. One of my first projects was upgrading from Vista 4 to Vista 8.03.
Worked with a company moving to Epicor, and in their old system the physical inventories were always really, really close. Their “secret” was the inventory manager wrote parts in and out of inventory constantly throughout the period (multiple times a day) whenever they found a bin count to be off - just changed the quantity to whatever was there at the moment 
.
Fast forward to Epicor, with reasons required for Qty Adjustment, and affecting the financials, it was a different story…
Back when I wore a younger man’s clothes, it would take 364 days to fix all the errors introduced by physical inventory…
Does your system provide an Inventory Variance Report? It’s possible that you had a bunch of parts that swung one way and another bunch of parts that swung the other way giving you a net value of only $984 in total variance.
More follow up … Turns out we had an exceptionally high amount of scrap in January. Just prior to the Phys Inv on Feb1 - Feb 3.
I’m thinking some “pre- physical inventory corrections” were made. Our crappy ERP system (not Epicor), has no way to prevent you from back dating Inv Adj’s. So some “needed corrections” may have been discovered by the Phys Inv, and were entered a material scrapped sometime in January.
