Introduction to Inventory in Operations

Inventory is a key ingredient in figuring out what you need to roast, package and ship out each day. Demand, and Auto Plans, use on hand inventory quantities across all inventory types: Roasts, Blends, Packages and Bundles - in their calculations.

Purchasing Inventory

You can purchase Green Coffee by clicking the Purchase page on a particular Green Coffee:

Creating Inventory

You can create inventory by completing Roast, Blend, Package or Bundle tasks in Operations, using the attached recipe for each item.

Updating Inventory

You can use an Inventory Count to update many inventory items across different inventory types - e.g. updating a roast and a blend at the same time - or use the links in the Operations dashboard to see all inventory items of a certain type, as shown below:

Frequently Asked Questions

Inventory is negative. How can that happen?

You can go into negative inventory a couple different ways:

  1. You consumed that item as an ingredient, whether in a product or in a work-in-progress state, without completing tasks to create more inventory of the thing.
  2. If it's a packaged unit, that is something that you can sell, then it's possible that you added a new order or updated an existing one to consume more today than you've planned for.

You can prevent going negative by contacting Support to require inventory before consuming it

Why do I have extra inventory? 

It's possible in a couple ways to have extra inventory at the end of a day / production period:

  1. An order was planned for today, but then its roast day was changed to another day later in the week. System does not automatically reduce the Plan for the day when that happens, so you 'overproduce'.
  2. An order was updated to need less of an item that was already planned.
  3. An order was cancelled that was planned

In this case, if you don't update the Plan, the system will expect that you produced more than needed and save that as inventory/carryover. I think that's happened with more than just bulk coffee (e.g. roasts or blends), but with packaged units and that's effecting your daily production. 

How can I plan for extra Inventory at the end of the day?

You will need to plan extra tasks for that item, as AutoPlan will just roast enough (respecting your batch-size constraints) to fulfill outstanding Demand.  

What happens if I don’t have enough inventory to complete the task?  Can I still click it?

It depends     
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