Most of the inventory management operations fall into one of the following categories:
- Item creation and changing item’s properties (such as description, cost etc.)
- Changing item’s prices (such as putting items on sale)
- Transferring inventory in or out using transfer orders (TOs)
- Creating purchase orders (PO’s) based on certain criteria such as according to the restock/reorder levels.
- Physical inventory counts at the store or in warehouse.
Some of the above operations need a
mobile data collector to perform, in connection with RMS
to count the actual inventory and then
transfer data into RMS. The “Physical Count” functionality in RMS allows importing data file from a data collector. However, a similar functionality is missing from RMS for Transfer and Purchase Orders, which is necessary in some cases.
If one store in a chain is used as warehouse, a Transfer Order from warehouse to store may need to be populated from a data collector. In turn, Purchase Orders are not created prior to the receiving, but ordering is done manually and a Purchase Order is created “on-fly” while receiving a shipment from a supplier.
The Solution:
Retail Hero’s Top Import Utility resolves these issues with the following features:
- A standalone application that may be configured to run from the Tools menu in RMS SO Manager
- Lists all orders available in RMS: Purchase Orders and Transfer Orders with types and statuses
- Imports a data collector file into RMS with two columns per line: Item lookup codes (SKUs) and quantity.
- Adds items from the data collector file to the PO or TO if they do not exist in the content
- Adjusts item quantities according to the data collector file
- Verifies each imported item against the item’s supplier in the database and alerts the operator if no match is found. If the SKU being imported is not found in RMS, Top Import lets the operator create the item on-fly