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Material Management

Material management within Compiere focuses on the physical side of storing and tracking items that are defined as being physically stocked. Central to this is the warehouse and its locators, into which and from where products are received, moved or shipped. In this article we will deal with Compiere standard functionality. An advanced Warehouse Management module with additional features is also available.

Warehouse Overview

Warehouses belong to Organizations, and it is recommended that you have a one-to-one relationship if user security role access is an issue, because roles are organization specific. Warehouses can have multiple locators and one default locator is selected.

Warehouses and locators are set up through the Warehouse & Locators window:

On the Locator tab, the warehouse locators are defined as follows:

Adjusting Product Quantities

Product quantities are adjusted through the Physical Inventory and Internal Use inventory windows. Physical Inventory adjustments are made during inventory counts or ad hoc manual inventory quantity adjustments, while Internal Use Inventory adjustments are made when items are expensed directly to a specific charge account:

Physical Inventory Entry

Updating material item quantities is done through a physical inventory transaction.The book (system) values are updated to the applicable quantities counted, and the adjustment is passed to the product. An example of this would be for a product with a book quantity of 10 and a physical quantity of 20, where an adjustment of a positive quantity of 10 will be made. We shall demonstrate the process of quantity counting to perform a physical adjustment.

1. Preparing a quantity count is done through the Physical Inventory window:

2. Create a count list of a Product Category:

Note that you can also set the Inventory Count to Zero, which would indicate a blind count. The correct count quantities need to be updated for each product and location, and the Physical Inventory transaction completed to correct the stock quantities:

Internal Use Inventory

Internal use inventory transactions are used for where products are written off or expensed, and not necessarily sold or shipped to customers.

The transaction window Internal Use Inventory is completed for this purpose:

In the example illustrated below, the Product Quantity is charged to Marketing Expenses, based on its default Unit of Measure on the Internal Use Inventory line, as follows:

Moving Inventory

There are two reasons for moving inventory:

• External: Material Shipments to Customers and Material Receipts from Vendors.
• Internal: Internal Warehouse movements within the warehouse.

Movements between warehouses are also regarded as external and explicit. Material shipment and receipt documents need to be created as such (also refer to the Compiere concept or Counter Documents where, in such cases, explicit inter-organization counter transactions can be automatically created, if this has been set up).

Material Shipments to Customers

Shipments are processed with reference to the Sales Order control document. We have previously explained that shipments occur based on the shipping rules defined in the Sales Order. Manual shipments are processed when the Standard Order sales order document type is used.

Processing a manual shipment (Generate Shipment from Order) is done through the Generate Shipments (manual) window:

A shipment with lines linked to the Sales Order lines will be created for this customer. This shipment can then be printed as a delivery note:

The default printed shipment document will look like the example shown in the following screenshot: