4 Best Practices in the Inventory Management through LPNs

This best practices that you implement in your supply chain is to Keep Track of Stock Movements through LPN (License Plate Number). You can make it a rule in your in your DC (Distribution Center) that any product which may be just one unit or two units or three units whatever it is any product, group of products, any set of products that you’re moving always gets an LPN. 

  1. LPN could be even called as a case number, it should be always applied to the products, even if it is one product or two product that moves together in the DC. 
  2. The second rule is you should always scan this LPN into a location, it could be a dock door location, it could be receiving, staging location in the dock-door or it could be some problem location or it could be an exceptional hospital Lane.It always helps you to find the product and improves visibility by providing details on what the product is, where it is located in your huge facility. This will help you to exactly locate the product, where the product is and what that product is by looking up in the system by having an LPN.
  3. You can also generate an aging report which tells the details of SKU’s that are staying at your DC for a long time. It may have not moved for the last 90 days or 180 days or 360 days.
  4. If you are buying product from small vendors and they’re all shipping parcels which comes in boxes. These parcels may not have a label or the label would have been damaged or sometimes it does not have a packing slip. If nobody knows where it came from and why it is there and if there is no way to track it back to an ASN or track it back to some kind of a vendor or a customer order or purchase order that misplaced it’s it just sometimes gets tricky. When you run into this kind of scenario you can apply an LPN and then scan it to a location. It will now be visible in your system and when somebody comes asking for that specific SKU you can easily track the location and content of the SKU. Supposedly if a vendor calls you and asks if you have received this particular SKU, you can directly track it and confirm with your vendor on this and you can send it to a customer and the vendor and you will earn after you ship it to a client / customer asking for this particular SKU. 

When you apply an LPN into every single product or every group of products in a normal scenario everything will be fine because you’re receiving a PO, packing slip with the shipment, based on the packing slip every detail can be extracted like, from which vendor it came from. After receiving that specific shipment, then verifying the shipment the vendor gets paid and you have the product going in it’s reserve or active location. 

lpn-in-warehouse

We have heard horror stories where this 3PL shipped some product on behalf of another customer and the products showed up and nobody looked at it and nobody knew the product was there and after some time it’s like completely damaged and everybody found it after six months. It cannot be sold anymore and we have heard more horror stories like that, you know this is something to think about when assigning LPN and make that a thumb rule for operations in your DC for any product that comes assign an LPN. Hopefully this best practices in inventory management is helpful, please check out other best practices we have in our YouTube channel and share your thoughts, share your comments and we would love to hear your feedback below in the comments section.

Originally published at Smartgladiator.com on Jun 18, 2019.

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Jun 2019
By Puga SankaraLeave a comment
Author:
Puga Sankara
About:
Puga Sankara is the Founder, CEO of Smart Gladiator LLC. Smart Gladiator designs, builds, and delivers market-leading mobile technology for retailers, distributors, and 3PL service providers. So far, Smart Gladiator LoadProof has been used to ship, receive, and scan more than 100 million boxes. SG LoadProof is a patent pending Centralized Enterprise Photo/Video Document System on Cloud for Supply Chain. SG LP is built on the fact that photos & videos are vital docs as important as POs/SOs/Legal Contracts/Fulfillment Orders that reside in ERP/WMS/TMS systems, that serve as compelling, conclusive, unequivocal proof of crucial, critical, vital operations executed in Supply Chain within/across orgs when fulfilling customer orders as well as meeting contractual obligations between orgs as merchandise is transferred between different parties that partake in Supply Chain functions & operations. And these photos/videos data should not be stored in someone’s Smartphone or Email Inbox or in their personal/work Computer, but should be stored in a Centralized Enterprise system, where such data can be pushed into super-fast, stored securely, accessible to all stake holders (CFO/Sales Reps/Customer Support/AR/AP) in an org, as well as facilitates super-fast retrieval/sharing. LP is an Enterprise System of record for Photo/Video docs & is as important as an ERP which is an enterprise system of record for POs, SOs, Legal Contracts between parties etc. that have huge legal ramifications, also as important as a WMS (Warehouse Management System) that hold indispensable shipment & fulfillment data on orders. Like how Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat etc. have evolved into social media platforms/systems that enable individuals to showcase their beauty/pretty clothes/lovely cosmetics/hep coolness etc., LoadProof is an Enterprise system that holds similar photos/videos, but for a different reason, not for show off, but to serve as compelling, conclusive, unequivocal & indisputable system of record and proof that can be presented even in the court of law, when there is a dispute between parties while they execute many facets of the Supply Chain functions & operations. SG LoadProof is also an Enterprise System of Record for Photos, videos and any other digital documents for your Supply Chain Network. A system of record (SOR) or source system of record (SSoR) is a data management term for an information storage system (commonly implemented on a computer system running a database management system) that is the authoritative data source for a given data element or piece of information. The need to identify systems of record can become acute in organizations where management information systems have been built by taking output data from multiple source systems, re-processing this data, and then re-presenting the result for new business use. In these cases, multiple information systems may disagree about the same piece of information. These disagreements may stem from semantic differences, differences in opinion, use of different sources, and differences in the timing of the extract, transform, and load processes that create the data they report against, or may simply be the result of bugs. The integrity and validity of any data set is open to question when there is no traceable connection to a good source, such as a known System of Record. Where the integrity of the data is vital, if there is an agreed system of record, the data element must either be linked to, or extracted directly from it. In other cases, the provenance and estimated data quality should be documented. The “system of record” approach is a good fit for environments where both: 1. there is a single authority over all data consumers, and 2. all consumers have similar needs Here, LoadProof is the System of Record for pictures and videos for all the entities in Supply chain who uses pictures and videos to track using any Supply Chain System infrastructure. 1. LoadProof provides accurate, thorough, complete, and latest information in pictures and videos related to any entity in the Supply chain that is tracked. 2. LoadProof is the single authority on pictures and videos related to any entity in the Supply Chain that is tracked 3. LoadProof doesn’t let any external system to copy the records being stored in it, which eliminates the data being duplicated in multiple places to preserve the data integrity and credibility. 4. LoadProof has a secured login procedure which lets only users with select level access to view the data and modify the records which helps in maintaining LoadProof is becoming the Industry Standard System for Photo & Video Docs for Supply Chain Smart Gladiator is located in ATDC - Advanced Tech Dev Center (tech Incubator) in Georgia Institute of Tech. Click for a demo - https://loadproof.com/apply Puga is a supply chain technology professional with more than 25 years of experience in deploying capabilities in the logistics and supply chain domain. His prior roles involved managing complicated mission-critical programs driving revenue numbers, rolling out a multitude of capabilities involving more than a dozen systems, and managing a team of 30 to 50 personnel across multiple disciplines and departments in large corporations such as Hewlett Packard. He has deployed WMS for more than 30 distribution centers in his role as a senior manager with Manhattan Associates. He has also performed process analysis walk-throughs for more than 50 distribution centers for WMS process design and performance analysis review, optimizing processes for better productivity and visibility through the supply chain. Size of these DCs varied from 150,000 to 1.2 million SQFT. Puga Sankara has an MBA from Georgia Tech. He can be reached at puga@smartgladiator.com or visit the company at www.smartgladiator.com. Also follow him at www.pugasankara.com. [Read More]
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