Materials Management
The Materials Management component of the Ecious ERP business solutions software addresses a broad range of issues around your material inventory: products, price lists, inventory receipts, shipments, movements, and counts within a company, its organizations, as well as to and from suppliers and customers.
Product
A 'Product' in the Ecious ERP system is something that can be sold and/or purchased, (or something that can be stored) and it has to have a Price. The main examples of Products in the inventory mangement software are:
* Items
* Services
* Resources
* Expense Types
An 'Item' is a physical good that can be sold. 'Services' are not restricted in terms of availability whereas 'Resources' are restricted. 'Expenses' can be billed, for example: a consultant who incurs some travel expenses can be invoiced to the customer.
A Product can also be described as a "collection of Assets with similar attributes." One of the attributes of a product is its storage location as defined by warehouses and locators. The warehouse is the point of service. A warehouse may have more than one locator. Each Locator has predefined dimensions:
* Aisle
* Bin
* Level
Another attribute for Products in the ERP system is the 'Product Category'. Product Categories enable you to group products with similar characteristics, pricing structures, accounting rules and reporting. For example, by using the controls of the ERP business solutions software you can globally set or change a discount structure for a Product Category. All products in that category inherit the revised discount structure.
Product Catalog
The Product Catalog organizes all of your products for simplified searching based on product attributes. For example, you may use the Product Catalog to search for all products that are "shirts," "yellow" and "short-sleeved." The Product Catalog optionally details product bills of material and substitutes.
Price Lists
Multiple Price Lists are supported for all purchased and sold items. Ecious ERP business solutions software has a Purchase Price List functionality, which allows simple control of discounts from suppliers. The system provides general and customer specific sales price lists. Price Lists are date controlled to allow special sales initiatives.
Distribution and Multi-Warehouse Control
Ecious ERP business solutions software supports multiple warehouses with user defined locations within each warehouse for recording stock locations in shelves and bays (Bin Locations). With the Ecious inventory mangement software, physical warehouse can be broken into multiple logical warehouses such as receiving, quality assurance and testing, bulk storage and picking. Priorities can be set to ensure that picking takes place from bin locations in a prescribed sequence. Inventory movements can be effected between bin locations and warehouses. Movements between warehouses can be configured to produce appropriate shipping documentation and manage 'in transit' stock.
Stock counts and stock valuation adjustments are managed by recording the difference between the book stock quantity and the count quantity and processing any difference so that sales activity in the inventory mangement software can continue in parallel with the stock take data entry process.
Stock used for internal purposes can be written-off to record the stock decrement and consequent financial entries in the Financial Ledger.
