Intraday Inventory - Overview

Typically, inventory is scheduled as one "Final For Post" weekly event based on the Post Calendar or, in addition, smaller events can be scheduled to occur on several days or each day during the week. Intraday Inventory refers to the practice of performing inventory counts of key operational products multiple times throughout a day, to identify inventory issues early and monitor variances throughout that day.

Intraday Inventories can be facilitated by creating templates for each daily count event and then scheduling the counts using those templates. Users can then use reporting and the Dashboard to view the intraday counts and variances.

Note: This process is best utilized if used to monitor a limited numbers of products, since they will be counted multiple times per day.

Intraday Inventory Setup

Create a generic template and name it for the desired intraday inventory event.
Add the desired set of products to the template and save it.
Copy the template multiple times and for each copy, edit the Template Name to include the time of the count.
Create a scheduled inventory by Template for a specific day and select all of the time-specific templates for that event; do not include the generic template.
Repeat steps 1- 4 for each intraday inventory event (i.e. set of time-specific templates) to be defined.

Tip: Create several generic templates, each for a limited set of products, rather than 1 large generic template with all of the products to be counted using this process. Each generic template would represent one intraday inventory event.

Intraday Inventory Process

Print the count sheet for the earliest scheduled count for the intraday event.
Count the items on the count sheet.
Enter and review the physical counts for those items.
Repeat steps 1- 3 for each subsequent time-specific count in the order indicated by the template name.
Perform steps 1- 4 for each intraday inventory event (i.e. set of time-specific templates) you created.
Retrieve the Daily Inventory Counts report to view the physical counts entered for each of the scheduled events and the variances that occur between each count.
A regional or corporate user can retrieve the Consolidated Daily Inventory Counts report to view the counts and variances for multiple locations.

What You Need To Know

The business value of this data for analytical purposes is completely dependent on strict discipline in terms of timing. Therefore, it is incumbent on users to ensure the quality of their data by performing, entering, and reviewing the counts in a timely, sequential manner.
If you edit an earlier inventory event after completing a later event, you must also re-review all inventory events that occurred after the event that was edited in order to maintain the integrity of the count data for the reports.
Net-Chef does not store intraday variances - the application only stores one count and one cumulative variance per product/storage/lot for each date. The last actual quantity to be entered and saved (along with the resulting variance) will be the quantity of record for the day.
Therefore, intraday counts and variances displayed in the reports noted above will NOT be visible in any other inventory screen or report.