Odoo is an all-suite enterprise catering to the need of all business applications. Likewise, the Human Resource and Accounting in Odoo, Inventory management is also a critical component of ERP system that helps you to manage all retail locations and warehouses.
Larger the company, more the number of warehouses and retail stores. For example, A wholesale supermarket has loads of products and collection of stock items. They will have multiple warehouses to house their products. A mere paperwork with a listed number of staff cannot manage the huge phenomenon. There comes the need for an assistant like an ERP solution for effectively managing the whole slot. The implementation of ERP system enables you to organize the number of items with a specific identification number which can be confirmed easily. It enables you to check the inventory levels for a particular category of product.
An Inventory ERP thereby help you with proper reporting mechanism, easing out all tasks related to your store and your warehouses. This, in turn, helps the manufacturing department to schedule their production in accordance with the reports. It helps you to track all the payments and finance flows running into your accounts.
Inventory management in an ERP systems helps you avoid mistakes and take quick decisions. ERP system enables the most efficient stocking methods for your inventory and helps to improve all the internal operations. ERP system today have advanced features like double-entry inventory with no stock input, output or transformation. Other important features like Drop-shipping, Cross-docking, and Multi-warehouse etc. are also taken care of by ERP systems.
Much small organization and retails stores are using ERP software to manage their warehouse and stocks which calculates surpluses, rejections, repairs and other important planning metrics for the entire inventory.
For a food manufacturing company, Odoo is a blessing as it encompasses, an out of box module called FIFO. Through FIFO, one can easily track the inventories based on its expiry date. This module indicates that whatever comes in first goes out first.
Let us keenly look into the process of FIFO Module
- In prior, make sure all products we receive belongs to the same time period. All products with the same time and expiry date should be placed under one place called LOT. To make this procedure intact, we need to assign a particular Lot Name for each product received with their quantity during the Incoming Shipment time
(Figure shows how a lot is assigned to a particular Incoming Shipment)
2. Now moving to the major step. When we have lots of sequences, make sure that while creating a sales order, you select the lot on first come basis. If we miss this, products may go expired.
To eradicate such situations, Open ERP has a function called default Lot Selection where the lots while creating Sale Order will be automatically selected as per FIFO. Truly speaking this is a cumbersome task for the user to select the right lot but now the system will be doing this for us.
(Shows that as we add a product in sale order and enter the quantity the system by default selects a Lot as per the FIFO)
The best part of this module is that we can also override the FIFO so if we want to select any other lot here we can simply delete this and select another one.
Hope this article gave you an insight into the efficiency of Implementing FIFO Method in Odoo ERP.