In today’s P21 training tutorial, we will talk about Item Master Inquiry in Prophet 21.
IMI is an invaluable tool for inventory management with P21 as it gives you all of the details for a particular item within a single window. You are also able to quickly sort and filter data from a variety of tabs for the most efficient overview of inventory and transactions.
We will not cover every functionality of Item Master Inquiry today (that would be a two- to three-hour-long video) but will focus on the most commonly used tabs and settings so you can better understand how to quickly leverage this powerful tool.
How to Open Item Master Inquiry:
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- You can launch Item Master Inquiry in a search just like any other module in P21, but you can also open it directly from a keyboard shortcut.
- My favorite way to reach Item Master Inquiry is to use the F2 shortcut.
Keep Learning: How to use Prophet 21 Keyboard Shortcuts.
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- When it first opens, Item Master Inquiry will generally load as a blank screen. Depending on where you launch, it may try to pull in an existing item.
Inventory Management Settings:
As a Prophet 21 user, it’s important to understand several key settings within inventory management.
- Days to display in Item Master Inquiry (our standard setting is 30 days)
This setting is important. We set a 30-day display because we generally want to view the most recent records.
Trying to pull records from an extended timeframe can also make your system run slower as it attempts to populate more records.
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- Open Item Master Inquiry for all locations in the current company.
By default, we have ours set to be All Locations. (Note: there are some tailored user settings that could affect this as well.)
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- Display Bin Allocations automatically in Item Master Inquiry.
How to open an Item in Item Master Inquiry:
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- Enter your item in the Item ID box.
- The Starting Date is pulled from the Days to display in Item Master Inquiry setting we referenced above.
Note: You can also launch IMI from your history if it is an item you have viewed recently.
Using Item Master Inquiry:
Once you have opened an item to view in Item Master Inquiry, there are three main sections on the front IMI tab by default.
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- Your location box on the left shows the quantity available, the date of the last count, and several other pieces of information.
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- To the right are the different Units of Measure for an item.
If you have a purchasing Unit of Measure (i.e. a case), it will be listed along with Unit Size and Net Weight.
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- The bottom tab shows your Availability and the item In Flows and Out Flows based on your selected Location.
Item Master Inquiry Tabs:
We will not cover every single tab in this tutorial (we could spend a lifetime going through all of them), but there are a couple of important ones that you will utilize often.
Note: The location you chose in the first window will carry over into each one of the tabs. However, you can still change your location in many of the tabs.
Net Quantity Available:
Under Availability is the Net Quantity Available box.
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- Net Quantity Available is NOT the same as Net Stock. It is essentially just your quantity available with the addition of future order information.
- Most people only look at the Quantity Available. But if you are using Release Schedule or Quantity on Future Order, they will influence your Net Quantity Available.
Lot Tab:
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- The Lot Tab shows your main Lots, Quantity On-Hand, Quantity Allocated, UOM, Traceable Factor, Supplier ID, and Supplier Name.
- The bottom window shows the Bins where those lots are stored as well as Quantity Linked and Quantity Allocated.
Purchase Stock Card:
If you have watched any of our other Prophet 21 training videos, you have probably seen the Purchase Stock Card more than you would like to count.
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- This is the same screen you see when you run PORG (Purchase Order Requirements Generation), but in PORG, it is called calculation.
- The Purchase Stock Card is helpful if you are trying to research a single item.
- This screen shows an in-depth look at the impact your current Net Stock, Order Point, Order Quantity, and Required Units have on the item.
Usage Tab:
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- The Usage tab shows the usage of your item, which includes your Actual Usage, Filtered Usage, Scheduled Usage, and Forecast Usage.
Sales History Tab:
The last thing I want to mention is the Date setting. As I mentioned earlier, we go by a default 30-day setting to keep our system running quickly.
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- However, if you need a more extended timeframe, you are able to change the dates in several of the tabs, including the Sales History tab.
- It is good practice to keep the Start Date as a lower number. Maybe not thirty days. Maybe that is too short for you.
- But do not go out for three years or to the beginning of time as it will cause the system to drag unnecessarily.
Final IMI Tips:
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If you notice something wrong as you enter data and work within IMI, you can always come back to your main Item Master Inquiry screen. Right-click in an open space. Hit Refresh Data, and the system will then re-pull the data for you.
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If you are seeing an item allocated while looking at the open orders and open POs, and you do not see the quantity that matches up to that front tab or even the Purchase Stock Card tab, most likely, it is the Start Date causing the issue.
Conclusion:
Item Master Inquiry is an extremely versatile tool in Prophet 21. It enables you to view a host of detailed information on any item and gives you a holistic view of data through many different tabs and functionalities.
We focused on some of the most commonly applicable tabs and functions in this tutorial to help you start quickly leveraging the capabilities of IMI.
If you have questions about other tabs in Item Master Inquiry that we didn’t cover or other aspects of automation, put a comment down below and we will try to address them for you.
