Establishing an Initial Inventory

Establishing an initial master inventory is only necessary if you are manually entering and tracking samples. If you are populating your samples inventory from a third-party system, it is not recommended that you establish an initial master inventory.

As outlined in Scenarios for Managing Samples, either an administrator or an end user can establish an inventory. However, because Siebel Samples Management routes and maintains transactions by Employee ID, only the user who creates an inventory (the initial inventory count) can create or manipulate that inventory.

Before adding products to the master inventory, you must verify that the products are correctly defined for inventory tracking. For more information, see Defining Internal Products paying specific attention to the tables in the topics Product Categorization Settings and About Samples and Promotional Items Settings.

In particular, in the Products form, you must select one of the following fields:

• Orderable

• Either Inventory or the Lot# Tracking

When neither Inventory nor Lot # Tracking are checked, the sample is not tracked in inventory.

For more information, see Defining Internal Products and Managing Samples Transactions.

Note: End users do not need to perform the procedures described in this topic if their initial counts consist only of samples transfers routed to them by their samples administrator. Instead, they should simply acknowledge the receipt of those shipments. For more information, see Acknowledging Full Receipt of a Samples Transfer. However, end users do need to perform the procedures described in this topic if their initial counts contain any records that they entered manually. End users who enter records manually must submit those counts and reconcile the initial inventory period.

To establish an initial master inventory:

• Count products on-hand. Establish an inventory count by physically counting the products currently on-hand. This process creates a list of the products in your inventory and an inventory period solely for your initial count.

• Add products. Add products to the inventory.

  For more information, see Adding Products to an Inventory.

• Submit count. Submit an initial count.

  For more information, see Submitting an Initial Count.

• Submit adjustments. Create and submit adjustments for the initial count.

  For more information, see Creating and Submitting an Initial Count Adjustment.

• Reconcile. Reconcile the initial inventory period.

  For more information, see Reconciling the Initial Inventory Period.