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About Service Inventories

Service businesses use the Service Inventory module to manage service inventory throughout its life cycle and to monitor inventory consumption during order fulfillment and during activities for field service engineers. Service Inventory also allows field service engineers who are mobile to manage their trunk inventories using a disconnected client.

Process Flow of Goods in Service Inventories

Figure 20 shows the process flow of goods in a service inventory.

Figure 20. Process Flow of Goods in Service Inventory

At the center of the process flow is the service parts life cycle, a closed-loop process. The life cycle includes the following stages: receiving (good), order placement, picking and shipping, in-transit, customer, receive, test and sort, repair, restock to good, and back again to receiving (good). Incoming goods from the manufacturer arrive at the receiving (good) stage. Goods go out to field service engineers during the in-transit and receive stages. Through the field service engineers, these goods go to customer sites through an in-transit stage for on-site repairs or replacements. Goods also leave the life cycle during the repair stage, when the outsource vendor can test, repair, scrap, recycle, and replace the goods.

A materials manager can automate these tasks using the Fulfillment or Part Locator Engines. The Replenishment Engine automates the production of orders to restock inventory locations. For more information, see Cycle Counting and Replenishment.