Inventory

ION Inventory allows you to keep track of your inventory, including locations, suppliers, quantities, serials, lots, and more.

Philosophy

Our system takes a unique view to keeping track of your physical inventory. While other systems will add and remove items to inventory based on their physical availability, ION keeps the items as "inventory" and manages if they are available/installed/in progress via a status. This allows ultimate search-ability of parts. I.e. if you want to find where that specific serial number is.

With this approach, we encourage the creation of inventory as early as possible in the process. For instance, when creating a purchase line for a part, inventory is instantly created and put in an "On order" status. This allows you to pass serial information to the supplier if desired or create issue tickets against the serial number.

Add inventory

Use the "New Inventory" button in the top right of inventory to add inventory items. You can add attributes to each inventory item, including lot number, serial number, location, quantity, usage type, cost, and supplier.

Use the "New Part" button to create a new part in your part library.

Use the "Export to CSV" button to export your inventory lines to a CSV file.

Lot number, serial number, and quantity

Inventory items can have lot numbers, serial numbers, and quantities set. Any inventory item that has serial number cannot have a quantity greater than 1. Serialized parts can have lot numbers, but lot-tracked inventory items need not have a serial number.

ION allows multiple inventory items, with different locations and different tracking attributes (e.g. lot, serial) even amongst the same part number.

Part Inventory Status

Part Inventory status calculation is as follows:

• If there are 0 available, then the inventory status is Unavailable

• Unless the inventory line is scrapped quantity, in which case, the status is Scrapped,

• Or, the inventory is installed on an aBOM, in which case the status is Installed.

• If the inventory is on an open or failed run, the inventory status is WIP.

• If it has been Kitted and the kit is still open: the inventory status is Kitted; if kit is completed the status is Available

• If it is received into a location, and into an unavailable location: the status is Unavailable; otherwise, it is Available.

• If it is a line item on an open PO, the status is On Order. Setting that PO to "Canceled" will change the inventory status to Unavailable.

• If the inventory location is Unavailable, then the inventory status is Unavailable.

• If the inventory does not match any of these checks, then the status is Available.

Locations

ION keeps track of your locations, so you can use the autocomplete to fill in which inventory location an inventory item or items are. You can manage already-created locations in the "Factory" section of ION.

Suppliers

Suppliers work similar to locations. You can use the autocomplete to use an existing supplier or create a new supplier right within the inventory manager.