Pull sheet for materials to gather for up coming job
I am new to ESC and am trying to find out how others are pulling materials from stock and organizing for upcoming jobs. My approach in the past would be to take my material list of items needed for job (organized by location, (shelf), copper fittings, sheet metal fittings, pipe fittings) and pull from stock. If we are shy or running low I would order more for stock or directly to the job. anyone have other approaches to handing this process. What print outs are you using? Can you do print out by location?
Comments
Harry,
Our parts needs don't run to pipe fittings, sheet metal, etc., but if you are ordering standard size I'm not sure it matters. ESC's inventroy system will, if set up properly, tell you what you have in stock, and what you need to order for a job.
The dispatch print out will tell you what parts to pull for that job, unfortunately it won't tell you where they are in a given warehouse. (Hear that Scott? Pull sheets would be exceeding cool!) You can look up the parts and the system will tell you where they are supposed to be, but that's a major pain in the, er, neck. We have our stockroom well organized, and the part numbers give us a good idea of what aisle a part is on, but it still depends on good knowledge of the parts and stockroom to find things efficiently. We have discussed with dESCo, a mobile app that would allow one to access inventory records, do transfers, etc. But that will likely be a year or 2 or 3 away if they decide it's worth it.
So, what we use currently is the dispatch to pull the parts, then we transfer them either to the vans for regular work, or into staging bins for quoted work or larger jobs. The staging bins are separate warehouses created to isolate WIP parts from general inventory for a specific job, This helps in a number of ways, primarily, subsequent dispatches and orders won't assume that those parts are still available when, in fact, they have been pulled for other use; and it makes it much easier to track what happened to a $3000 widget if it doesn't get put on an invoice correctly and pulled from inventory.
When starting out, it seems simplest to lump everything in to Warehouse 0000, generally your main stock room as you don't need to transfer parts around, etc. But the first time you actually have to track a part it's pretty apparent that it doesn't work well.
We actuallly have over a hundred warehouses in use:
0000 Main stock
0001-00??: correspond to the service van numbers
0030-0079 Staging bins (shelves or cubbies actually)
0080 Returns shelf (RMA has been requested)
0099 Virtual returns (RMA recieved, parts shipped or returned, waiting for credit)
etc.
Hope this helps. Inventory control/management is a substantial time sink, but the ability to look into ESC and find out that, yes, you have 20 of the correct part in stock, 5 in main stock, and 1 each in 15 vans is really useful.
Thanks Rick,
I have read some of your post on the bin idea and I think it is great. We use one of our vendor's part numbers for our part numbers, so the location is not in our numbering system. I would also like to see the pull sheet have the location though. This would help, when someone with limited knowledge, find the part quickly, pulling materials for projects. We are a small 3 van company that is growing, organizing as we go. ESC is an important part of this growth and I am just learnings its many ways of doing things. Your help is greatly appreciated as I read your post on several subjects.
Inventory sure does take a lot of time but it sure takes a ton of $$ to run for that .25 or $5.00 part that I need everyday wishing I would of pulled it for the job or had on the shelf when I needed. It will still happen but maybe 1/2 as often. Maybe someday 1 job out of 20 or maybe .. well you get the idea we all are trying find the best investment of out time to make it work.
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