Q: At a high level, what are your thoughts on what ‘should’ be catalogued within an inventory system. Obviously all relevant spare parts that have/require a BoM’s connection are a given, but where do you draw the line on consumable type items. By value? By purchasing frequency? Particularly if these are non-stock the questions of what value is added is raised if they are low value/turnover/criticality.
A: The old ‘rule of thumb’ about cataloguing is that if you are going to buy something more than once then it should be catalogued. The issue is not the value of the item (because you are going to buy it anyway) the issue is the efficient use of procurement time and energy. Essentially you don’t want to keep spending time sourcing the purchasing data over and over or buy the wrong thing because it seems ‘near enough’ or we don’t know what we did before. This is especially so if person A buys it today and person B buys it later. Much better to have the data at your finger tips.
As you would know the catalogue is different to the inventory. In my mind, everything in inventory should be catalogued but not everything in the catalogue should be in inventory. The inventory is a subset of the catalogue. So, asking stock vs. non-stock is the wrong question, the real issue is: will we buy this item more than once and what efficiency is there in having the data available for subsequent purchases?