Warehouse Management
Where stock is sitting that nobody ordered
Stock by location, movement history and ageing, including the stock nothing has asked for, which no standard report puts in front of you.
See it answer one of theseAsk it
Questions you can ask on day one
Asked in plain language. Each answer prints the SAP entity, field and period it was computed from, underneath the figure.
- “Where is stock sitting that nothing has ordered in six months?”
- “Which locations are running hot?”
- “What moved yesterday, and where did it go?”
- “Which materials have the largest stock value by plant?”
- “Where are we holding stock we have not counted this year?”
- “What came in last week against what was expected?”
What it reads
The warehouse objects behind an answer
Stock by location
What is held, where, in which unit, down to storage location and bin where the system records it.
Goods movements
Every receipt, issue and transfer, with its direction, quantity, date and the document that caused it.
Inbound and outbound deliveries
What is arriving and what is leaving, against what was promised.
Material master
The attributes that make stock figures comparable: type, group, unit of measure, plant assignment.
Physical inventory
Counts and the differences they found, which is where a stock figure earns or loses trust.
Why it is hard
What no standard report does for you
The interesting rows are the ones that are not there
Dead stock is defined by an absence: material with no outbound movement in a window. You cannot filter for a row that does not exist, so the question has to be asked as what exists minus what moved, which is two reads and a difference.
Ageing is a calculation over movement history
How long something has sat is not a field. It is derived from the last movement against today, per material and location, and it changes every day, so a figure computed once and stored is wrong by the time anyone reads it.
Quantity means nothing without its unit
Stock figures span units of measure, and adding them produces a number with no meaning. Every quantity is carried with the unit its document recorded, and totals are split rather than merged.
The rows that are not there
Most warehouse questions are about presence: what is held, where, how much. Those are straightforward, and your system already has screens for them.
The expensive questions are about absence. Stock nothing has ordered in six months. A location nobody has counted this year. A material that stopped moving and nobody noticed, because nothing generates an alert when a thing simply fails to happen.
You cannot filter for a row that does not exist. The question has to be constructed (what is held, against what moved in a window, and the difference between them), which is exactly the kind of query that never gets written because it takes a specialist an afternoon.
Ageing changes every day
How long stock has sat is not stored. It is derived from the last movement against today, per material and per location, which means any figure computed once and saved is wrong by the time somebody reads it.
That is the same property that makes a saved AnrilX view worth having: a panel stores the question rather than the answer, so an ageing view re-reads live stock every time it is opened and the window moves with the calendar.
Units are not a formality
A stock total that spans units of measure is not a total. AnrilX carries every quantity with the unit its document recorded and splits rather than merges, which occasionally produces three numbers where somebody wanted one, and never produces one number that is quietly wrong.
One of these questions, answered
Where is stock sitting that nothing has ordered in six months?
2.9m SAR across 214 materials, and 61% of it is in one place: the high-bay racking at plant 1000, which is also the most expensive storage you have. The question is an absence rather than a value, so it is answered by what has no movement against it rather than by what has a low number.
Source: A_MaterialStock and I_MaterialDocumentItem · stock on hand where no issue document exists in the trailing 180 days · valued at moving average price · by Plant and StorageLocation
Assumed: ordered means an outbound movement, not a sales order that was never delivered. Materials received inside the window are excluded; new stock has not had the chance to sit.
Where it stops
What it will not answer here
The limits particular to this module. Worth knowing before a pilot rather than during one.
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Dead-stock questions are answered over the window you name. A material with no movement in six months is not necessarily obsolete, and the platform does not draw that conclusion for you.
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Quantities are never summed across units of measure or plants where the system treats them separately.
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Bin-level detail is available only where your system records it. Where it does not, the answer says so rather than aggregating up silently.
Questions people ask us
Can it find dead stock?
Yes. It reads what is held against what has moved in a window you choose, and reports the difference. It reports that as stock without recent movement rather than labelling it obsolete, which is a business judgement rather than a data one.
How current is a stock figure?
It is read at the moment you ask. Nothing is cached as a figure, so there is no extract to be out of date against your system.
Can it mix quantities across units?
No, deliberately. A total spanning several units of measure is split rather than added, because the merged number would be meaningless.
Questions often cross into
Purchasing, read at the grain the money sits on
Purchase orders and their items, goods movements, supplier invoices and info records, with spend sitting on the item, where it actually lives.
Which orders are exposed to something that has not arrived
Production orders, operations and component demand: where a schedule is exposed to something that has not arrived yet.
Orders, deliveries, billing, and the pricing underneath
Orders, deliveries, billing documents and the pricing conditions underneath them, read at header or line level, in the currency each document was written in.
Bring the question your reports cannot answer
Thirty minutes against a live SAP system we provide: no access to yours, nothing to set up. If it cannot answer, you find that out in half an hour rather than three months into a pilot.