18 Jul 2024 | Windward Software
How To Deal With Obsolete Stock
This Windward Webinar explores obsolete inventory management within Windward System Five. Explore the associated tools and processes to successfully manage and prevent dead stock from eroding profits.
- Scott Rockins led the webinar discussing obsolete inventory and its impact on businesses.
- He highlighted that obsolete inventory can silently erode profits as it takes up valuable resources and space.
- Scott discussed the importance of managing and deleting obsolete records to prevent accidental sales or orders.
- He outlined the process of marking items for deletion, reviewing superseding parts, and moving deleted items to a different category or supplier.
- Scott introduced the concept of using the superseding parts feature to manage obsolete inventory, allowing businesses to sell off old stock and replace it with new stock.
- Several strategies were shared to avoid reselling deleted products, such as changing the part number, category, supplier, or description, or using comments to warn users.
- Scott also mentioned a more advanced process to mark items for deletion via a data load, which can be beneficial when dealing with a large number of discontinued records.
- The webinar also highlighted upcoming workshops and webinars focused on experimenting with non-inventory items and different inventory types.
- Scott also mentioned the availability of a stock management tool webinar recording for further learning and the Windward Software Help Center for additional resources.
- The webinar concluded with a Q&A session, though no questions were asked during the session.
0:03
All right, welcome everybody.
0:05
This is a new set in our series.
0:09
This is the experiment and grow series.
0:12
And today's topic is dealing with obsolete inventory.
0:18
And now I think that this webinar touches a critical and overlooked aspect of inventory management.
0:26
Obsolete inventory, it can kind of choke you out.
0:31
Dead stock can silently erode your profits because it ties up valuable resources and occupies space.
0:39
Here to talk about this topic today is Scott Rockins.
0:43
Go ahead, Scott.
0:44
Thanks, Kyle.
0:46
And that's exactly why it's so important, right?
0:49
When you've got these old, obsolete records, depending on the situation, you can accidentally sell them to people if you still have stock, or you can accidentally order them, that sort of thing.
1:04
And either way, they kind of just get in your way of searching in system five.
1:08
So we're gonna go through a few tools here that you can use to manage this.
1:12
And as part of our sort of theme for this next chapter in our webinars and workshops, we're gonna talk about one little experiment you can do to use a feature that's not designed for obsolete stock to sort of help manage it.
1:26
and you can play around with that.
1:31
So we're gonna review a few things.
1:33
We're gonna talk about deleting items or marking items for deletion, which is a fairly well-known and normal process, but a few tips I'll give you as we go through on how to sort of manage that.
1:48
We're gonna review superseding parts, which is not directly related, but it's something you can experiment with to use this feature to manage product that you might still have some of, but it's no longer available.
2:03
So you can't order more, but you need to sell off your old stock, and you may have a replacement product for that stock.
2:10
So we'll talk about that a little bit.
2:12
Also, when you mark an item deleted in the software, it hangs out and can still, if you look for it hard enough, get in your way.
2:19
So we'll look at how you can move that to a different category, or perhaps you could try moving it to a different supplier, like moving it off the main supplier you normally order from.
2:28
how you can make those adjustments, and use comments to bring it to your staff's attention that this is not a product you want to be selling or ordering.
2:41
So just a little review before we jump in to today's content.
2:47
This summer and September, we're going to focus on experimenting with System 5 to help you grow your business.
2:56
At Windward Software, we're always experimenting and trying new ways to achieve our objectives and help you use system five, build out system five and so on.
3:10
And we really focus on trying experiments that are low cost but potentially high payout for us.
3:17
And we want to bring that concept, that ideology into your use of system five and that's what this chapter is about.
3:24
So it's about using tools that you might not normally think of as things that would apply to your business and trying them out to see if that feature, that tool in system five can help you do something, help you achieve a goal that you have for your business.
3:39
And we're gonna start with obsolete inventory.
3:44
So first I'll go through the very basics in case someone or anyone here is new to system five.
3:51
So I'm gonna bring up a part record And we're going to say that this part record I usually buy from my vendor, but that they are going to bring out a replacement part record.
4:07
So this one here, this top one, is the one I'm going to treat as obsolete, and first I'm going to edit that item.
4:16
Now you can see over on the right that I still have five of these in stock.
4:21
Now depending on your situation, that might be something you just have to write off because are not useful at all anymore, or something you can sell off.
4:29
They're still perfectly good.
4:30
It's just that there's a new product that you would sell from now on instead of this one.
4:37
So everybody's situation's different, but the basics, if you'd like the system to not bring the item up in searching and not make it available for sale, or rather what we warn people really is to mark it deleted.
4:50
So if I click on the garbage can up top, it marks this for deletion.
4:55
Now, you can also have, I'll pick another product here, a situation.
5:02
If you've just loaded a lot of products, say you're new to System 5, I'm going to have to find a product I've never used.
5:10
I think this one's, let's try this guy here, where you can delete the product entirely.
5:19
Now, you'll notice this, because when you go to mark deleted, the little drop down will be enabled, and you can delete this immediately.
5:26
And that is only available if the product's never been sold and never been ordered.
5:31
System won't let you delete it, because it'll cause some data corruption, if it's been used in the past.
5:39
So I'll delete that one immediately.
5:40
Now, careful with that, because it's gone, gone when you do that.
5:44
No more product.
5:46
So if I rerun the same list, that product's not there anymore.
5:53
So that's the basics of marking an item for deleted or completely deleting the product.
6:00
You just use this right here.
6:05
Now you may have a number of these to deal with.
6:08
So there's ways to deal with a larger group.
6:11
And I'm gonna show you two strategies that you can use.
6:14
One of which I'm gonna go through in detail here in the webinar and one of which I'm gonna point you to an article that shows you how to do it with a data load which is a little too involved to do here in the webinar, but I'll point you in the right direction.
6:29
So let's suppose that I have a group of products from a vendor or in a certain category that I need to mark for deletion or delete.
6:40
Doing them one at a time can take quite a long time.
6:44
If you need to do them as a group or look at a list of products and choose the ones you want to discontinue, go to your purchases area.
6:53
So I'll just scroll up there, Inventory and Purchases and Purchases, and right down at the very bottom, you'll see this Stock Management Tool, which if you frequent these webinars, I do talk about this quite a bit because people seem to not be aware of it, and it's quite handy.
7:16
So I'm going to pick a vendor here.
7:18
You can do this by vendor or category or multiple categories.
7:24
There's a webinar recording all about this report, so I'm not going to spend too much I'm explaining it.
7:31
But earlier this year we did a webinar on this tool.
7:36
So here I can see a list of everything from Whirlpool and you can see on the right hand side I'm able to mark products deleted.
7:45
That's just gonna mark them as deleted.
7:47
It won't delete them immediately.
7:49
You need to go to the record to do that.
7:52
And this doesn't take effect immediately when I click that.
7:56
You can see I can toggle it on and off.
7:59
Oops, if you double click you'll end up in the item record, it happens when I hit the commit button up here.
8:07
So if you need to do a group of products, you can search by category or vendor or a combination and choose the ones that you can delete.
8:18
This also lets you review things like your sales history, because if you're deleting it because you're considering, say, just not carrying that product line anymore, at least you're gonna review your sales history before you make the decision.
8:32
It also can tell you what you might have on order and what you have in stock.
8:40
This is also a great place to set your reorder points.
8:43
So if you had reorder points on the item, then you would wanna remove those reorder points as another fail safe to making sure that no one orders it or sells it.
9:01
So if you leave the report, it's gonna ask, did you wanna commit these changes?
9:05
I'm gonna hit no, but if you hit yes, it would delete those five items that I have marked on the right-hand side.
9:14
Now a couple tips, and these are really things customers taught me.
9:18
So when I'm marking an item for deletion, this will make more sense if I sell this product.
9:25
So I'm just gonna open a quick sale here, and if I try to sell the product I've marked as deleted, you'll notice that it's not letting me.
9:42
And this is because I've used a little trick I learned from a customer, using our superseding parts feature to block someone from selling the item.
9:53
So now, the system has guided me to selling a different product.
9:59
So I just wanna show you how I did that.
10:02
So first, I'm gonna look up the original item.
10:07
This is the new version.
10:11
So I'm gonna just open that record for this new version, and what you'll be able to see is this feature I'm using, which is called superseding parts, is designed so that you can train the system to know what the replacement piece for this product is.
10:33
And you can flag items so that you can sell them or not and can order them or not.
10:40
And you can create relationships between different inventory items.
10:45
So there's more to superseding parts than we'll review in full today, but one useful way to use it is to set the old record as superseded by the new record.
11:01
So this product that I've marked as deleted, I actually went into that product record, although you can do it from either product record, the new one or the old one, and you click the Add button here, you select the other piece, and you can say, well, this is the new one that supersedes the old one, or this is the old one that superseded by the new one.
11:24
And you can also make two SKUs equivalent, which is handy when you have aftermarket parts that fill the exact same need as each other.
11:35
Say you've got the Honda air filter and you've got the aftermarket third-party air filter.
11:41
They do the same job, cost different things.
11:44
You may want to set them as equivalent.
11:47
In our upcoming workshop, we're going to talk more about superseding parts, equivalent parts.
11:52
But one use of this tool, one experiment you can try is playing around with the superseding parts feature when you're deleting parts.
12:02
So if I go into this part here, the old one, if I do anything with this record, I'll get this warning.
12:14
Now in some businesses, they find that that is not enough to stop their staff from using the SKU because they're quite diligent at finding this old record.
12:27
and you are able to force your way around it.
12:32
So they find that that pop-up isn't quite enough and here's some tips that they use to make it even harder to find or more obvious.
12:43
One is change the part number or the supplier part number, all of it, and put something obvious like that in front of the part number.
12:50
So it stops coming up in searches when you type in the part number.
12:54
That's one little trick I picked up from a client.
12:59
Another thing is to use a comment.
13:02
So in the comment section, you can put it in the warning upsell comment.
13:08
So every time the item is touched, you can put something obvious or sell this instead.
13:25
You can do things like that, but that's still just a warning.
13:27
If you put that as a sales upsell warning, then it will come up every time the item is interacted with at all.
13:35
If you put it in an invoice comment, it will come up only when someone tries to sell it.
13:42
So if you put it there, if you put it in a purchase warning, every time they drop it on a PO, it would come up.
13:48
So you can use these comments to reinforce to your staff that this is not a product we wanna use anymore.
13:57
You can change it to part number here so that it doesn't come up in searching by part number.
14:03
edit the description to put something big and bold, like that, those are all options.
14:16
And I suppose a couple things that you could also do are move it to a different category.
14:22
So if people are searching by category, they can't accidentally use it or change the vendor and make a vendor called discontinued.
14:32
Quite a few different strategies I've seen people use.
14:37
So if I wanna do something like change the category, and this can be useful for other purposes as well, I can do that by going down to the bottom, right-clicking my mouse, and turning on my supervisor override, which you have to have that permission to do this, but that starts flashing, and now if I wanna double-click in here, it lets me move it to another category.
15:09
So I could move that to miscellaneous, let's say.
15:12
or I could make a discontinued category.
15:20
Another simple way to sort of make it more obvious is I could create, I could move it to a different vendor and I could create a vendor called discontinued.
15:31
So let's say it was this one.
15:33
I can change out the vendor.
15:35
I can do all of the above if I want.
15:39
So those are all simple tools you can use to avoid reselling the product.
15:46
That is change the part number, change the category, change the supplier, change the description, and if all of that isn't quite enough, use comments like this to warn the user.
16:04
Those are all simple things that are still allow you to override it, still allow you to sell it if you really need to.
16:12
If you can really, you can drill past the pop-ups, you can force the item to be sold.
16:20
What I'd like to spend a few minutes on is the less straightforward one, which is, how do I use a superseding part?
16:27
Because there's a few settings to turn it on and a few different ways you can use it.
16:38
So first, if you'd like to try this experiment where the system forces you to sell something different when you sell the item, you're going to need to enable the superseding parts option.
16:51
You can do that in your setup wizard.
16:58
I'm a big fan in the setup wizard of using the title search down at the bottom you type in supers superseding here's the tick box that turns it on so invoice or sorry inventory options one use superseding parts and one of the reasons I call this an experiment is that you do need to experiment with these three options that you see to the right so I can pick display all parts, which when I type in the part number, it'll let me choose the old part number, show me that there's another one, and it'll actually let me see all my options.
17:40
So sometimes that's the right decision.
17:45
Next, I can display all parts that are available for purchase or sale, which are able to flag the situation in the item, which we're gonna show you in a minute.
17:55
or I had this one turned on, display only the parts, so only the superseding part.
18:02
Directly intervene and do not allow the user to see anything else.
18:06
So for this quick demo, I'm gonna start here, show you what that looks like, then we'll change it to this, and then we'll try the last one.
18:19
So if I'm searching for the product, and I type in, If I choose this product, we can see it's deleted.
18:34
If I try and sell that, so I'll go to the sale, you can see it's showing me the superseding part or the equivalent part.
18:47
You can tell it's superseding, so it's the better, but by both, if I hover, you can see the little comment and this little plus.
18:58
So then it really does let me sell either one or order either one.
19:06
The second option, display all parts available for purchase sale is similar.
19:26
If I go back to my sale now and I try to sell that item, I see both items, but I'll show you what it allows you to do.
19:35
So if I edit this item, the DNS, in the superseding parts tab, there's these two options, can sell, can order.
19:52
So when using this option, it allows you to see all the items that have these turned on.
19:57
If you turn them right off, then you won't be able to see the product at all.
20:01
So you get an additional flag.
20:03
And sometimes you want one of these flags and not the other one.
20:06
So sometimes you wanna sell off what you have left, but not have it go on a PO, for example.
20:12
Usually just that way.
20:19
So if I turn these off, oh, it might prove me wrong here.
20:27
I'm gonna get rid of this one.
20:38
And I click on it.
20:39
It did show me both, but then it just directs me.
20:41
It only lets me do that.
20:54
And lastly, there's the top option, which is the most restrictive.
21:03
Actually, I think it's the most open, pardon me.
21:06
If I edit the item, I can drill down to this.
21:15
And now I think it's gonna actually let me sell that.
21:21
Oops, pardon me, close that item, go to the sale, tell you the truth, I think those options, the last two options are pretty similar in using them this way.
21:42
But you can see how you can guide your staff to the newer product.
21:49
And there's a few ways you can use superseding parts.
21:52
The equivalent part method is also quite useful when you have that aftermarket situation, no name brand if you want.
22:01
Now, before we kind of move on to closing remarks here and questions, it's also worth noting that if you have a larger number of discontinued records, or if your vendors supply you with a list of those records, that you can data load it.
22:27
And there isn't really enough time to go through the whole procedure here in this webinar.
22:32
However, what I will show you is an excellent solution article here written by my friend Steve Wind and sort of advanced support.
22:43
And so you can get your hands on this article, How to Mark Items for Deletion via a Dataload, which is basically you just put a column on your spreadsheet with a Y on it, if you can see that.
22:56
I think I can zoom in a little.
22:57
And this is an article you can get from our Customer Care Solution articles.
23:01
That's the title.
23:02
It's the easiest way to find that.
23:04
These articles are getting really quite helpful.
23:14
Since we're here, I'll also point out that we are going to have some upcoming workshops.
23:21
So the next – we'll have another webinar in August on the 8th on how to experiment with non-inventory items.
23:32
And so how do I use non-stock items?
23:35
What are the different ways I can do that and the different levels of detail that I can use?
23:42
And different ways people utilize them.
23:47
So in the workshop, we're really going to experiment with different inventory types, which includes quite a few different types and advanced features.
23:55
So this is sort of something we've done in the past where we do inventory tips and tricks.
24:01
But what we're gonna do this time And it's just a little different in that we're going to experiment with different inventory types.
24:08
And when you see these inventory types, you might immediately think, well, I don't use serial numbers, so I don't need to work with serial numbers.
24:17
What we're going to experiment with is, well, when might you, even if it's not normally something done in your industry or in your business?
24:24
Is there ways you can use that feature to your benefit, even if it's just on a few products?
24:29
Same with kits and modifiers, which are really diverse, the number of ways you can use those.
24:34
Matrix items, which are usually used in clothing, you know, sizes and colors, but lots of product types have sizes and colors.
24:42
And you know, what are the different ways I can use matrixes to group products together?
24:47
Pack sizes and cases and quantity discounts, those can be used in creative ways together.
24:53
Same with alternate suppliers and things like lookup words.
24:57
So we'll go through a whole bunch of different scenarios system, what we'll try and focus on in the workshop is, what's a trick, an experiment I can try with a few products, and how might that help me in my business?
25:12
So if you're interested in experimenting this summer with different ways to use system five, then our next workshop's going to be all about inventory types, or if you're just interested in learning more about those inventory types, it'll be fairly in-depth on those different topics and how you utilize them.
25:36
For all our workshops, you can find them here on our website for purchase.
25:42
So we've got this upcoming August and September workshops here.
25:47
September, we're gonna talk more about experimenting with the different features that have to do with business units is the way I would say it, departments, more user licenses, and how you use those creatively in different ways.
26:02
You can also get a great deal on a bundle to have both workshops and the recordings here.
26:10
And, of course, there's recordings of the past workshops that you might find really helpful as well.
26:27
Just a little shout out, we've been having a lot of people having a lot of luck using our new tool Sidekick, which we have enhanced to make it a great mobile tool for inventory accounting, as well as building out quotes, and searching for inventory levels.
26:48
Now I feel like I'm gonna steal all of Kyle's thunder at the end here.
26:52
But we want to thank you for coming today.
26:54
I don't see any questions here in the chat, but I welcome some if there is any.
27:00
Well, not a whole lot in the question and answer yet, but I am gonna mention a few things, Scott.
27:07
You talked about the stock management tool webinar, and I just wanted to maybe share, maybe you could share the screen again, and go to webinars.windwardsoftware.com.
27:20
This is where all of our recordings are just stored.
27:27
So I'm gonna just show everybody where that is.
27:36
Yeah, we should do this every time.
27:38
So, yeah.
27:39
Yeah.
27:40
So here's the long list that we're building out of the different webinars.
27:46
So even for the recording of today's webinar, if you want to review, if you felt I went too quick there and you want to slow it down, grab the recording.
27:55
We usually get them up within about 24 hours or so.
27:59
It's a good resource that we're building out there.
28:03
I find this entire help center here to be a very valuable resource to my clients as well.
28:10
which also has a future webinar schedule and workshop schedule here.
28:17
Yeah, and another thing, we've got a lot of comments in our last survey about a user guide.
28:23
And in fact, if you go to our Help Center, the quick reference guide is right there.
28:30
And we've since added a direct link on that under the support portal as well to make it really easy find lots of good resources here I also am a big fan of this my client because sometimes you need tech support but you need to have it at a certain time this is a useful tool to arrange that whoops my browser is going everywhere on me sorry let's just so I guess to wrap things up lots of resources out there with a little looking and thank you very much all of you for coming today hope I'm hopeful to see some of you in the webinar and the workshop in August.
29:21
Sorry, no workshop this month.
29:23
It's my month where I took a vacation, so I had to take a break.
29:27
Hope you took a break too.
29:31
All right, thanks for attending everybody.
29:33
Thank you guys, have a great day.
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