The transformation of purchased materials into sellable goods is foundational to every manufacturer. Too little inventory leads to lost sales yet too much results in lost profit. Having the right balance of parts within the four walls doesn’t even guarantee success. There are endless ways to lose track of where components are and the timing, count, and method of moving them to where they’re needed next. Expiration, cold-chain, cost, and other value-related characteristics often justify detailed tracking of container, lot, and serial numbers.
Demands from outside organizations make inventory management even more complex. Customers expect consistently high quality and fast, dependable delivery. Regulators and auditors expect traceability records covering years of production. Inventory contamination has led to recalls that disrupt entire industries and nations, not to mention the responsible organization suffering from lasting reputational damage.
Spreadsheets were once powerful replacements of hand-kept registers; they removed the mystery of scribbled 1s versus 7s and added confidence to summations. It was new demands for speed and agility, not a scarcity of paper, that led to the dependence on macro-enabled sheets. The internet, pandemics, workforce shortages, and Amazon next-day delivery have introduced a new level of complexity that leaders recognize as the sign that spreadsheets, still fantastic for formulas, must be retired to museums next to the ledger books. The challenge is finding a tool that provides intelligence to stay ahead of external disruptions and increase productivity among a user base with less experience and higher expectations.
QAD Adaptive ERP provides inventory intelligence by combining decades of industry experience with modern technology. Your users will be enabled to rapidly optimize inventory whether they start with years inside a legacy version of QAD ERP, experience with another system, or just a new APICS certification. Benefits of inventory and traceability inside QAD Adaptive ERP include:
Right part, right quantity, right place, right time - getting this right takes a lot of effort. QAD front-loaded that effort into our product design so that your production and shipping are never starved or overflowing
Enterprise-wide visibility - the QAD Cloud will deliver clarity from the top floor to the shop floor. Senior leadership can make informed decisions from in-application analytics that visualize globally aggregated data, while material handlers on four continents simultaneously operate with efficiency in their own site and language
Value-add compliance - scalable inventory attributes and test records that can feed Certificate of Analysis reports and customer (even order) tolerance profiles so no margin is left on the table. QAD customers benefit from solutions and industry expertise covering a range from government regulations like the FDA and industry standards like MMOG/LE
Eliminating cross-department friction - no more having to pick a loser between finance and quality’s requirements for traceability, and operation’s need for efficiency. Configure what’s right for you without a department resenting the decision.
QAD Adaptive ERP delivers a broad and deep set of capabilities around inventory management, tracking, and traceability. These include:
Lot control and status - specify each item’s level of control including lot-optional, lot required, and serial number required and even a combination of lot and serial. Inventory statuses can defined with elective restricted transaction types, and then applied to the most granular level that you have configured.
Package defaults and identification - define packaging types, structures and associations (for example: Widget A gets packed 10 to a Box size B, which fit 12 onto Pallet spec C). The packaging line knows exactly what they need to do and, downstream, a material handler knows exactly what the pallet contains.
Forward and backward traceability - inventory gets traced through every process. If a supplier calls to inform about a quality problem, users of QAD Adaptive ERP can find every impacted produced and shipped part in moments. Similarly, if a customer calls to report a problem, their sales information can be used to drill back to the production order for root cause analysis and further recall actions.
Attributes and quality - Define attributes that can be assigned to item profiles or tests and used to further categorize inventory, determine quality, and provide Certificate of Analysis reports. Profiles can also be created for customers to facilitate manual allocation beyond what FIFO and FEFO logic suggest
Consignment - setting up consignment agreements with suppliers can be a smart method for transferring risk and keeping cash until purchased materials are used. QAD Adaptive ERP provides full traceability and visibility of consignment inventory with clear and configurable transfer of ownership.
Intersite Requests - lower costs and increase speed by leveraging item-site level ability to request inventory from other sites in your organization. Distribution and intersite demand can be included in the material requirement planning (MRP) engine, which also covers existing allocations and order point logic
Seamless label printing and barcode scanning - customers do not need to search for external scanning and printing solutions. QAD Automation Solutions delivers live inventory management to on-the-move material handlers through native transaction and label engines.
Even the lower-frequency activities - QAD Adaptive ERP also covers inventory activities that may happen less often and with lower enthusiasm. We help remove the reluctance around calculating kanban quantities, executing occasional cycle counts, and freezing for annual physical inventories.
