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Improving the Inventory Process Essay

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Improving the Inventory Process Abstract

MMAS manufactures and distributes high-accuracy metering products to the North American utility, sub-metering and industrial markets. The company recently revamped its procurement processes, switching from offshore to domestic parts suppliers for some components to provide more flexibility in its supply chain. Workers at its 100,000 sq ft manufacturing and distribution facility were bogged down with a paper based, manual inventory management process. All inventory moves were written down and key entered into MAPICS on stationary desktop PCs, a time-consuming process that made it difficult to manage the company’s inventory of parts and finished products. Annual physical inventories took …show more content…

This is an ERP (Enterprise resource planning) which is a business support system that maintains in a single database the data needed for a variety of business functions such as Manufacturing, Supply Chain Management, Financials, Projects, Human Resources and Customer Relationship Management. An annual inventory takes upward of 2 days to complete.
The company found a technology solution to help its distribution operations keep pace with the company’s growth – QuikTrac. With QuikTrac MMAS will be able to cut the time it takes to complete its physical inventory process in half and significantly improve inventory accuracy and warehouse efficiency using a wireless data collection solution that communicates in real time with its MAPICS enterprise resource planning system. Using label printers, MMAS has deployed bar coded location labels throughout its warehouse. Workers scan the location labels with the mobile computers, and key enter quantities during inventory moves. Warehouse employees will also use the devices for cycle counting, and annual physical inventories.
In order for QuikTrac to be functional several system updates had to occur, software had to be updated and new servers had to be installed in order to hold the abundance of information that would now be input via wireless devices. QuikTrac system requires at least 2.0 GHz with 20 GB HD, 256 MD RAM running Windows XP Pro (Preferred), 2000, or 98 with ODBC

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