. INQUIRIES FROM THE BODY OF AN ORDER
Objectives
- How to access these Inquiry Screens
- The Inventory Inquiry Screen
- The concept of the Future Ledger
- The concept of the History ledger
From the body of a sales order entry screen a hotkey called “InQ”. The “Q” is the highlighted character and is the letter which will access the multiple inquiries available to a salesperson
Example:
This will access the multiple inquiries available to a salesperson. This doc will be related the highlighted inquiry screens
Inquiries- Inventory Inquiry
Inventory Inquiry
The Inventory Inquiry Screen is used to quickly glance at a product’s availability in any one of your branches within your company
The description of the product you are inquiring on will appear in the upper left-hand corner of this screen. To the right of the description is common information from the product file
Status: The status of a product can be
Stock-an item you stock and sell out of your branch
Non-Stock- an item you would not stock in your branch but would ship direct to your customer or order it special for them
Review- An item that has been recently added to the system and is under Review before it can be used (Authorization to use an item under Review is required)
Delete- A product that is obsolete/discontinued and is scheduled to be deleted from the system. If an item is set to a status of delete, it is available for you to sell until the on hand goes to zero.
Pkg Qty- The package quantity is the quantity in a bag, box, carton…etc. This quantity is based upon the vendor’s package quantity. In most cases, you will have the ability to sell less than what is displayed.
Weight- How much the item weighs
Load- The load factor assigned to the item
Price Line- The Line this item is assigned to when pricing the item from the vendor
Buy Line- The Buy Line the item was assigned to when purchasing the item form the vendor
Below this information is a series of columns. Beginning with the first column on the left and working our way to the right
Wh#: This column represents the warehouse or branch number. In some cases, you may see an alpha letter to the right of the warehouse or branch number such as C, W, or P. This would indicate that particular branch was a Central Distribution branch, a Warehousing branch, or a Central Purchasing Branch.
If the branch is a Central Distribution branch, then the system will display the availability of the product based upon commitments from all branches that are part of the Central Distribution network.
Avail: The availability of the product. The availability is defined as the on-hand minus any commitment of inventory. This is what is available for you to sell to your customer.
In PO: This column will represent how many of this item is currently on an open purchase order waiting to come in.
In Xfer: This column represents the quantity of the item that is being transferred from one branch to another within your company.
In Proc: If your branch uses RF Warehousing, then the quantity in this column will represent items that are in the process of being picked or put-away based on whether it was a ship ticket or a purchase order being received. Any quantity in this column is NOT available until the put-away process is completed!
In Work: Not used at this time at GPS
Rnk: This is the rank of the product using parameters GPS uses to rank an item.
Demand: This is the Monthly demand of the item. The system uses parameters to calculate this demand.
30DaySls: In the last 30 days from the day you are looking at the inquiry screen, how many of this item was sold.
365Sls: In the last 365 days from the day you are looking at the inquiry screen, how many of this item was sold.
UM: The unit of measure for the item.
Inquiries- History Ledger
The history ledger can be accessed not only from the Inquiry hotkey off the body of the sales order, but also from the Inventory Inquiry screen.
The inventory history ledger will display detailed information pertaining to the inventory transactions that have happened with the item in question.
In the upper right-hand corner, you will see the actual on-hand quantity of the item. Just below that info, the number of commitments that are on open sales orders. It will also display how many are po’s and xfers.
There are a series of hot keys relative to this screen. The most commonly used hotkeys are “Chng View” and “Show.”
Change View (Chng View), will bring up the following options:
Based upon the authorizations that are assigned to you, this screen may not display all of the options shown above. Any of the views pertaining to a cost value such as “Selling Price/COGS/GP%” is an example of the users having the proper authorization assigned to them to see this info.
Some other common view choices are:
Customer/ On-Hand: The customer, vendor, or branch the product was shipped to or received from plus the on-hand of the product at the time of the movement. This view is the default view when accessing this screen.
Customer/ Serial#: Some products may require the entry of a serial number; this view will show whether or not a serial number was entered on the sales order or purchase order. It will not display the actual serial number but a count of how many serial numbers were collected. To see the detailed serial number entries, use the hot key called “Ser# Entry”
Customer/ Customer P/O: This view will display the customers PO number that was entered into the header screen of the sales order.
Customer/ Location: This view displays the customer the product was sold to or vendor product received from and the physical location the material was placed in.
Show
The “Show” hotkey is used to isolate certain transactions on the History Ledger screen.
The default is “ALL”. However, you have the ability to change what is displayed.
Inquiries- Future Ledger
The future ledger contains those transactions that have yet to happen. Unlike the history ledger that displays transactions which have been completed. This shows open orders, open purchase orders, bids or transfers. You can easily notice the difference between the two simply by the fact that these orders do not display a generation at the end of the order id.
This screen will also display the on-hand, committed quantity, the open purchase order quantity, open transfer quantity and how many are In- Process (Inpr)
The first column below the product description displays the order#. Following this column is the status of the open order.
In the above example, all the orders have a status of “Call When Complete”, which commits inventory immediately.
This view will show the orders based upon the SHIP DATE that is on the order. However, this may not be the true PRIORITY of the sale. Eclipse is first come first serve. Also note in the upper right corner is a prompt called “NCmt”. This means Network Commitments. There could be a sales order that came before yours in another branch. That order would have a higher priority than your NEW order would.
In order to display all of the sales orders that are committing this material and who is supposed to get their material first, use the “Show Only” hotkey
You will see a type call “Priority.” This will display the sales orders in the priority in which they will be shipped based upon the “First Come, First Serve” Theory.
Before Priority View
After switching to the Priority View:
Notice the order that has a ship date of 11/11/20 will get the item before the 8/6/20 ship date. Why, because if you look at the right side under Customer/Vendor, you will see a date and time stamp. The item on the 11/11/20 order was entered on the order before the item was entered on the order with a 8/6/20 date, hence….first come first serve.
A lot of what you are seeing in the above example also has to do with the status of the order. If the order with the ship date of 11/11/20 had a status of “W” or “S” and that date was outside the plenty date, the order with the 8/6/20 date would get the item first