Inventory Cycle Counts with Handheld Barcode Scanner:
- Review the Open Order Report in Sales Processing>>Sales Processing Reports (Menu 1) filtered for Material Only. All Jobs that should be on the street should be marked JCW in the line status column. This lets the system know that this item is not able to be scanned. If the line is not marked this way, it needs to be updated by “shipping” the Job by printing the Installers Work Order. This is probably easiest by using Batch Work Order Processing. The reason it may not have shipped when you originally printed the Work Order is a timing issue. If the material is not assigned and cut at the time the WO is printed, it will not ship. Conversely, anything expected to be on hand should not be shipped.
- Log into the handheld computer, select option 1 WHSE, and then select option 8 Physical inventory. If you need to use a hotspot for connectivity because of your setup, please see info below.
- Working by location in alpha-numeric order, scan each item’s barcode. Options will be displayed at the bottom of the screen with a short summary of the item displayed. Press Q to verify quantity and then location. After pressing Q, quantity will display first and then location. Pressing enter will move through the prompts and allow adjustments if necessary. You cannot skip Q, this process marks the inventory as counted for reporting.
- After scanning all items in the locations, there is a report to run, that displays items not scanned. For this example we’ll use location 16A through 19C. Go to Inventory Control and select the option Bar-code Management and Printing (Menu), and Inventory Not Scanned Report. Setting the location as indicated below will cover all of locations 16 through the end of 19. If the physical inventory spanned a couple days, the dates can be adjusted.
- This report will display all items that were not scanned to give you an opportunity to investigate and correct missed items. After investigating and then scanning missed items it can be run again.
A couple of tips on this process:
- It is useful to use the inventory purge function to remove small items (end of rolls). BMS suggests using 5ft for carpet products and 3 for vinyl, but the threshold is up to your discretion. This helps clean up the rolls available for assignment after they are probably used and keeps them from ending up on the Not Scanned report.
- When not finding items, try changing the location to the date of the inventory (MMYY) and then leave it in inventory. That way if it’s found later, just updating the location puts it back on track for usage. After you inventory all locations twice, you can start removing items. When doing this, you have to let everyone know that the rolls in a location like that should not be assigned. The only time this should not be done is when you do a full inventory of every location at one time, those items should be removed when a full inventory is completed.
To use a hotspot, after powering on the handheld, answering yes and entering password 1234, press the menu button until you reach a screen that says Administration at the top. Select Network then Wireless and change the SSID to the hotspot. This is case sensitive and does not have a search, you have to know the SSID. After saving SSID, from the screen with “Wireless” on it, there should be Security, select it and navigate to the passkey and enter the WIFI hot spot password. Once again, Case sensitive. After updating this information, in Network setup, press the function button followed by 1 to restart the wireless radio. After a minute or so you should see IP address appear. After that, just power cycle the handheld and you should be able to log in as normal.