Inventory & Products

Every product in the catalog has a type that tells the app how the item behaves. You set it in the Product Classification card on a product’s edit page, and the catalog shows a matching badge on each product card.

• Expendable (Standard) — the default. Things that get used up and vended out: gloves, inserts, drills, consumables. Most of your catalog will be this.
• Durable — a reusable tool, holder, or body that comes back after use. Durable components stay with a tool assembly and are skipped when you build an “expendables only” tool list.
• Spare / MRO — a maintenance part kept in stock to repair machines. It appears on the Spare Parts page and can be linked to assets and consumed on work orders. See Spare parts are products too.
• Gauge / Instrument — calibrated measuring equipment. Choosing this unlocks gauge specifications and serialized instances with calibration tracking. Only users with the gauge admin permission can set this type.
• Raw Material — bar stock, sheet, castings. Raw materials appear in BOMs, material receiving (with heat/lot capture), and the cost engine.
• Finished Good — created automatically when a produced finished good is converted into inventory; you do not set this one by hand. See Sending finished goods into inventory (IMS).

Why it matters: the type decides where the item shows up — vending and tool lists for expendables, the maintenance pages for spares, the gauging module for instruments, BOMs and costing for raw materials.

Changing a type does not delete anything. Reclassifying a gauge back to Expendable, for example, hides its gauge details but keeps the data.

Open Products and click the plus button (it only appears if you have the add-product permission). Editing an existing product works the same way; without the edit permission you see the page in read-only mode.

The basics

• Product Code — the unique code used for search, labels, and reporting. Choose it carefully: it is locked once the product is saved.
• Product Description — a clear name, what someone would actually type when searching.
• Preferred Supplier, Selling Price, and Brand — all required.
• Category 1 is required; Categories 2–4 are optional extra groupings. See Categories and suppliers.

Location assignment

The Location Assignment tree controls who sees this product. Tick a location (and optionally Include sub-locations) to limit it to people in that part of the site tree. Leave everything unticked and the product is visible to all users.

After saving

Save the product first, then re-open it to upload a product image (any common format; it is auto-cropped to 180×125). The edit page also shows the Current Location Assignment table — every cabinet bin holding the item with its stock, min, and max — plus Supplier Associations and the Product Classification card (Product types: what each one means).

Adding many products at once? Use the import wizard instead — see Importing products.

The Products page shows the catalog as a grid of cards — image, code, name, brand, price, category, and a badge for the product type.

• Search matches code, name, brand, and category as you type.
• The location dropdown narrows the grid to products assigned to one location and everything under it.
• The Active / Archived buttons switch between the live catalog and retired items.
• If your account is filtered to your own location, a Show All switch appears so you can temporarily see the whole catalog. Products outside your area look faded.

Archiving

Products are never deleted — they are archived. Click the archive button on a card (requires the delete permission) and the product moves to the Archived view, keeping its history intact.

Bulk Assign

With the same permission you also get a Bulk Assign button: click it, tick several product cards, then press Assign Locations. In the dialog choose locations and pick Replace (these become the only assigned locations) or Add (keep existing ones and add more). This is the fast way to roll a whole shelf of products out to a new site.

If someone says “I can’t see product X”, it is usually location assignment — open the product and check which locations it is limited to.

Categories are simple labels you create once and reuse on every product. Each product holds up to four of them (Category 1 is required), and they power the filters on the product grid, the tool-list builder, and reports. Manage them at Product Categories: the plus button opens the Add Category dialog, the minus button removes one (both need the matching permission — without it the buttons appear grey). You can also bulk-load categories with the Import button.

Tip: keep names short and consistent (“Cutting Tools”, “Abrasives”, “PPE”). A small, tidy list beats a hundred near-duplicates.

Suppliers are the companies you buy from, managed at Suppliers. Every product names one Preferred Supplier on its form, but a product can be linked to several suppliers in the Supplier Associations card on its edit page. Each link can store the supplier’s own part number, unit cost, lead days, minimum order quantity, unit of measure, and a Preferred switch.

Why bother? Purchasing uses these links: when a purchase order is raised for the item, the supplier’s part number and cost are already on file, and lead times feed reorder decisions. See Purchase orders from draft to closed and Auto-generating POs from the production schedule.

Product limitations let you cap how much of a product the members of a user group can take over a period of time — for example, “each operator may vend at most 2 pairs of premium gloves per 7 days”. It is the usual answer to expensive items walking out the door.

Open Inventory » Limitations (you need the privileges permission to see it), pick the user group from the list, and you land on the Product Limitations Detail grid — one row per product with two boxes:

• Limit — the maximum quantity allowed in the period. Leave blank for unlimited.
• Per — the number of days the limit applies to.

Edited rows highlight automatically, and the All / Limited / Edited filter buttons help you review what you have changed: Limited shows only products that currently have a limit, Edited shows your unsaved changes. Nothing is stored until you press Save; Discard throws your pending edits away.

Two things to remember:

• Limits are per user group, not per person. Everyone in the group gets the same allowance, so if one team needs different limits, give them their own group — see Managing user accounts.
• A blank row means no limit at all, so a fresh system starts fully open. Set limits only where waste actually hurts.

A tool list is a pre-planned shopping list: all the products and quantities someone needs for a job, built ahead of time so the items can be issued from vending in one go instead of hunted down one by one.

Building a list

On Tool Lists, click the plus button (requires the tool-list permission). Give the list a name, an assigned user (you can only assign other people with the manage-others permission), and optional notes. Then drag products from the Product Catalog panel — or click the + on a product — and choose a Pickup Location and Pieces Needed for each. Out-of-stock products are greyed out. If cost centers are configured, values you pick here are auto-applied when items are issued, so the person at the machine never has to enter them. See What cost centers are and how to set them up.

Life of a list

The page has three tabs that mirror a list’s life: Active Lists (badge Pending — still editable), In Progress (badge In Progress — some items issued, some remaining), and Issued Lists (badge Issued — done). Individual items show Issued, Skipped, Failed, or Pending. Once any item has been issued the list becomes view-only; use the Clone button to copy it (items and all) as a fresh editable list — handy for jobs you run repeatedly.

You can also generate a list straight from a tool assembly with its Add to Tool List button, optionally Expendables only so reusable durable tooling is left out — see Tool assemblies and the turret.

In this app a maintenance spare is not a separate inventory — it is a normal catalog product classified Spare / MRO, with a thin maintenance layer (an “overlay”) on top. That means one source of truth: the stock you see on the Spare Parts page is the same IMS stock counted in cabinets and bins.

The overlay adds the maintenance-only details: a reorder point, a free-text storage location, and links to the assets (machines) the part fits, so work orders can find and consume it.

Two ways to create a spare

• On the Spare Parts page, click Add Spare and either link an existing catalog product or create a new one on the spot — it is classified Spare / MRO automatically.
• On a product’s edit page, press Spare / MRO in the Product Classification card — the overlay is created for you. See Product types: what each one means.

Because the product and the overlay are separate layers, deleting a spare from the maintenance page only removes the MRO record and its asset links — the catalog product is kept, along with its stock and history. Stock levels themselves are managed on the IMS side like any other product.

For how spares are consumed on work orders and reordered, see Spare parts (MRO inventory).