Counting Notes

Count orders can be used in Power Pick to perform inventory counts on materials in several ways. To do any of this requires the Power Pick's "Physical Inventory/Cycle Counting" module.

Count orders can be either

1. Created in Power Pick using the built-in Count Order feature
2. Added through integration (imported or by using the API)

This discusses using the ItemPath API to generate Count Orders

Creating a Count Order

• A Count Order is created the same way as a Pick or Put Order, but with an order line quantity of 0.
• When a Count Order line is created, it will appear in Power Pick as a count order with that order line
• Multiple order lines can be added to the same Count Order.

Allocations

Similar to Pick and Put Orders, when a Count Order is allocated (either manually, or when beginning to process it), Power Pick will generate individual workorder lines (temporary order lines for each proposed transaction) -- one for each Breakdown.

Breakdowns

Breakdown (aka Location Content Breakdown): A unique stock item based on its Material Name and its attributes (based on the property settings: Lot, Serial Number, Expiry Date, etc.)

Count Date

Power Pick records the last Count Date for a material in a location. This means that there is only 1 count date per location for a material, regardless of how many Breakdowns there are.

Count Cycle

When a Count Order is created in Power Pick through integration (including API), any Count Cycle information (in Material Property) is ignored. The integration source is used to determine which materials are to be counted, in this case.

If you wanted to consider the Count Cycle or whether a material is subject to be counted when creating a Count Order using the API, you can do a check to see based on data fields that are available.

Extra Count details using the API

The ItemPath API introduces a few more attributes to the Power Pick data in /api/location_contents and that enhance how you can access count information for a material in a location:

• "isCounted" lets you know whether a material is counted (this is also in /api/locations)
• "countingCycle" shows what is the material's count cycle (days) is
• "nextCountDate" Informs you on when the material is scheduled to be counted

Count Deviations

You can query /api/order_lines to look at the order level for "quantityDeviated" which shows the difference between the quantityRequested (Power Pick's starting quantity before this count transaction) and the quantityConfirmed (so in a count order situation, this shows the count deviation). Filtering on this value will let you return count order lines by the count deviation.

Other Ideas

"isCounted" is a read-only attribute, automatically generated based on the counting cycle comparison at the time of when the API is called, so it is not able to be edited directly. Here are additional suggestions:

• Create a "counted" custom field* for materials and give it the status you want, updating manually.
• Create a "nextCountDate" custom field* for material and give it a date. This way you can compare and update manually, comparing against your own system.
   

*(requires the Power Pick Database Configurator module)