Just-in-time Inventory Management

NetSuite Inventory Management offers many tools to ensure that a company has just enough inventory on hand in the right locations to meet demand—whether that demand is to meet a customer’s service level expectations or to supply a work order in its own manufacturing plant.

In particular, NetSuite provides help through four key features: replenishment, cycle counting, traceability and warehousing.

Replenishment
Maintaining the right amount of inventory to support service level expectations is critical. NetSuite automates this process, automatically calculating preferred stocking levels, lead times and re-order points with suggestions appearing instantly in the order items list. In NetSuite’s multi-location distribution requirements planning solution, more advanced parameters help companies balance demand and supply across the entire organization.

Key capabilities include:

The ability to automatically calculate key settings
The ability to view and manage inventory across your organization
Multi-location planning
Purchase order receiving

Cycle Counting
Companies need to do regular checks of actual inventory levels for key items. Keeping an accurate item count can help reduce required safety stock and lower overhead costs. NetSuite’s Inventory Count feature improves inventory tracking and gives companies greater control over their assets. With this feature, companies can categorize inventory based on volume of transactions and/or value. They can also enter regular periodic counts of on-hand item quantities to maintain inventory accuracy.

Key capabilities include:

Increased accuracy of inventory levels
Automatic prompts for items to be counted
The ability to categorize items based on volumes / value etc.
Quality assurance

Traceability
Companies require the ability to trace products from receipt back through their entire lifecycle. With NetSuite, they can define inventory and assembly items as being lot or serial tracked. The system will enforce the capture and identification of all related information on each transaction to provide full traceability. The inventory detail screen lets companies view their inventory by lot or serial number and drill-down capabilities enable quick access to all related transactions.

Key capabilities include:

Lot tracking (multiple quantities)
Serial Tracking (quantity of 1)
Enforcement of full traceability
Purchase Order Receiving

Warehousing
NetSuite offers unique capabilities when it comes to tracking inventory across multiple locations. The physical locations themselves can be hierarchical, allowing the creation of sub-locations. These locations can then be broken down into bins to provide a more finite level of tracking. Once the locations and bins are defined, any item can be stored in any location, which gives companies a holistic view of inventory levels across all physical locations.

Key capabilities include: