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 Automate Inventory Reconciliation?

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Shannon Stommel's profile image
Shannon Stommel posted 04-06-2023 15:21

We have had a request to automate the Inventory Adjustments - Reconcile Balance process.  Users would like for all of their inventory counts to be reconciled hourly or daily rather than having to manually go through the process.
I have not found a way to automate this online and was wondering if anyone else has, and if it is good practice to automate the inventory reconciliation process?
Thank you!

Alex Walter's profile image
Alex Walter

Shannon,

I would say generally that it's not a good practice to automate reconciliation of inventory balances as the resulting transactions could have big financial implications. For example, if someone performs a count and makes a mistake and transposes two digits, you could wind up making a large financial journal entry to a shrinkage account.

However, we have had some customers who conditionally reconcile balances automatically. For example, in the case of non-variances between current balance and physical count, those are transactions that could be automatically reconciled.

An automation script triggered by an Escalation or Cron Task could do the trick in those cases.

Hope this helps,
Alex

Steven Shull's profile image
Steven Shull

It is possible to automate with an automation script but I'm not a big fan of automating it given the financial impacts. For example, if I make a mistake in the physical count that I typed, and the reconciliation is automated, we may end up purchasing more of an item that we already have sufficient quantity on hand to cover. If these are fast moving items that might not be that significant but if these are expensive parts that you use infrequently, that could be a problem. A good reconciliation process gives the reviewer a chance to ask for a recount before reconciling. 

Our default out of the box experience didn't really provide a good way to analyze those discrepancies so I could understand why people wanted it automated if they aren't reviewing them today. But a lot of customers aren't aware of what we added in the Manage Inventory work center. This reconciliation process is really helpful to see in bulk what needs to be reconciled and what the impact of the reconciliation will be for you to accept. 

In MAS (and Maximo Mobile if you're on 7.6.1.3) we added count books (formerly a Transportation feature) and a new application for executing counts. When you use a count book you can define the criteria for performing the count, see which counts were mismatched, and perform reconciliation at that grouping of records. Customers can still execute ad-hoc counts as well.

Shannon Stommel's profile image
Shannon Stommel

Thank you both for your feedback! 
The financial risk is definitely something I was wondering about with the automation.  Will relay this on to the management team, thank you again!