Ok, this one is for all of the inventory fanatics…
About 10 years ago we moved our inventory from a traditional stocking location to manufacturing point of use locations for each of our product lines. This is pretty painless for about 70% of our inventory. The major pain point of this transition is with parts that are used in different areas. This causes issues with reconciling backflushing. Currently the system allows for a backflush bin based on the primary bin setup on the part master or a backflush. The other option is to setup a backflush on the resource group.
Backflushing on the part master allows many areas to backflush from a single location. This makes it difficult to reconcile (cycle count) locations with the appropriate quantities since many locations are transacting against 1 bin.
Backflushing on the resource group is a little better, but does not allow for discrete locations within a build area. For areas with many parts, this makes it difficult to find the part.
The ideal solution would be a “PointofUse” table that allowed for the backflushing bin to be based on the part number being backflushed and the resource group being transacted against. The table fields would simply be something like: PartNumber, ResourceGroup, and associated bin number. This way part A could be backflushed from bin Area1Bin5 when resource group Area1 is scanned against. Part A could also be backflushed from from bin Area2Bin96 when resource group Area2 is scanned against.
This would help us with backflushing, kanbanning, reconciling, and, overall improved inventory control within the Point of use system. I am interested in hearing how others using or considering Point of Use inventory structure are facilitating this system limitation.