Understanding Coffee Item Inventory - Creating and Consuming
Coffee item Inventory is a key ingredient in figuring out what you need to roast, package and ship out each day. When creating an Auto Plan, we include Demand from orders and the quantity of hand inventory quantities across all inventory types: Roasts, Blends, Packages and Bundles - as we calculate what tasks need to be created to fulfill the demand.
To learn more about How to Adjust and Count Inventory, please see this Article.
For detailed information on Green Inventory, creating, update and purchasing it, please see this article.
Creating Inventory of Roasted, Blended and Packaged coffee items
For Coffee items, you create inventory by completing tasks in operations from the Tasks page. You need to complete Roast, Blend, Package or Bundle tasks in Operations - Task page.
Simply select the check box for each task as you complete it. Once completed you've transferred inventory from one state to the next.
Frequently Asked Questions
Inventory is negative. How can that happen?
Within the Tasks Page, you can cause Roasted, Blended or Green Coffee inventory to go into negative inventory by completing the tasks out of order.
This means, you completed a task in a step that consumed an item as an ingredient, whether in a product or in a work-in-progress state, without completing tasks to create the inventory of the ingredient.
Example: you completed the task of packaging a coffee, but the task to roast the coffee wasn't completed. Because you haven't created more inventory of the roasted coffee yet, and when you consumed that ingredient by completing the packaged task, the roast inventory can go negative.
Optional: You can prevent going negative by contacting Support to require inventory before consuming it.
Why do I have extra inventory?
It's possible to have extra inventory at the end of a day / production period - typically all stemming from order updates that happen after they were planned:
- An order was included in the plan for today, but then the order was edited and its production day was changed to another day later in the week.
- An order was updated to need less of an item that was already planned.
- An order was cancelled that was planned
NOTE: The system does not automatically reduce the Plan for the day when that happens, so you 'overproduce'.
In this case, if you don't manually update the Plan, the system will expect that you produced more than needed and save that as inventory/carryover. This can happen with your roast, blend, and packaged coffee, 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.
- If you would like to have extra inventory on a regular basis, we recommend using the tactic of creating a standing order for the par levels you'd like to have each day. Please view this article for more details.