A Place For Everything and Everything in Its Place… But Are You Sure? Cycle Counts in Dynamics 365 (Part 1 of 3)

Receipts, Sales, Transfers, Movements…the warehouse operation is constantly in motion.  How many inventory transactions occur in your warehouse each day – hundreds, thousands, millions??  With all the movement, a warehouse has to be meticulously organized and everything has to have a place, but how do you make sure this is happening day-to-day? Cycle Counts of course!

In Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, it is easy to automate your cycle count work creation so your team can be validating inventory every day, catching discrepancies before they become problems.

2 options for automatically creating Cycle Count work are Cycle Counts based on a Preset Threshold and Cycle Count Plans based on inventory or location attributes.

Cycle Counts based on a preset threshold

A counting threshold can be defined based on quantity or percentage limit of inventory items. To set this up go to Warehouse Management – Setup – Cycle Counts – Cycle Count Thresholds and fill out the form

• Select a quantity or percentage to be the minimum quantity needed to trigger the cycle count work to be created.
• Change the Cycle Count Threshold type to match the quantity set up.
• Specify how many days between counting the same item should have passed.

In the example below the threshold is set to be any items with less than 10 units on hand that has not been counted in the past 25 days.  By flagging the Process cycle counting immediately, the system will create Cycle Count Work as soon as the threshold is met.

After creating your threshold use select items or select locations from the ribbon to create the query to apply this threshold to specific items or specific locations and/or warehouses.

Cycle Count Plan

Cycle count plans are a way to set up specific cycle count strategies based on individual attributes on an item or location.  To create 1 or more plans go to Warehouse Management – Setup – Cycle Counts – Cycle Count Plans.  Set up the plan by following the steps below:

• Define a Plan ID and description
• If you are using work pools define the work pool cycle counts should be assigned to.
• Maximum number of records – this is the number of cycle count work items that are created when the plan is processed.
• Days between runs works in conjunction with maximum number of records.  Your cycle count program defines how often each item and/or location should be counted in a year.  Using this information along with working days you will be able to define how often and the number of records in each processing run.
• Empty locations has 3 options – include empty, exclude empty or only count empty locations.
• Work template – If you have a work template set up for Cycle Count work you can associate it with the plan you set up.

Once the plan is defined you can elect if you want to run the plan based on locations or based on specific product attributes.

The query set up for the product attributes is on the bottom half of the screen:

The product selection can be defined at the product level or at the variant level.

After the setup is completed you can run the Plans immediately or schedule it through the batch framework to run on the schedule that works for your business.

Once the work is created you even have options for processing it.  We will review one option for processing Cycle Count work in the mobile app in “It all starts with accurate inventory – Cycle Counts in the Mobile App of Dynamics 365 (part 2 of 3)”. The final installment of the series will explore immediate cycle counting which allows your picking team to validate empty locations as soon as they empty them in “The ULTIMATE multi-tasking – Cycle Counts in Dynamics 365! (part 3 of 3)”.

Setting up a regular cycle count program will set the foundation for keeping your inventory accurate and adjust mistakes before they make a major impact to your business and Dynamics 365 will make it easy.

 

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