Describe item tracking and tracing processes
Inventory management begins with procurement and sourcing. Inventory components for processes in Supply Chain Management can help you manage all the steps from identifying a need for product and services through procuring the product, receiving, invoicing, and processing the payment with vendors. You can configure procurement processes for specific business needs by defining purchasing policies and workflows.
Assets and inventories have lifecycle states that define their status levels. Asset management for Supply Chain Management allows you to create a lifecycle workflow that can be used to track and trace different types of assets.
The trace inventory dimensions function not only traces serial and batch numbers, but also provides details of all other dimension values that are associated with the item. Traceability is useful for quality assurance purposes and when you deal with warranties for a product. The tracing functionality is especially important for items that represent a certain risk—for example, medicine or chemicals, where defects in production can lead to item recall. It's equally important for guaranteed items to be able to trace back to the date that the product was manufactured or sold.
Tracking dimensions are a required field on every product that you set up in your system. You can use tracking dimensions to identify and determine how items should be tracked. By using tracking dimensions, you're able to manage inventory on a detailed level. A tracking dimension is used if you need to track an item throughout its life.
For example, a product such as a bicycle, which typically comes with a warranty, will be assigned a serial number, which the company can use to track how the bicycle is being produced, where it's sold, when the warranty starts, and more. Then if the bicycle is returned for repair, the company can identify the bicycle right away by using the serial number, allowing them to also identify the required parts or even the skill set needed to repair it.
Tracking inventory dimensions used to track items in the warehouse and outside are:
Batch number
Serial number
Owner
One of the factors for a successful business is having visibility into how much inventory exists at any given time. Inventory reports in Supply Chain Management display how much inventory you have in various different ways and explain how to be more effective in your inventory investments.