Lawson advice needed - MSCM and handhelds

We don't use the handhelds to pull - we use WH130 print for the same reason you state - it goes faster.

We have not been able to implement returns consistently through the handhelds, we tend to reverse issue on IC21.

Cycle counts are mini physical inventories - so they have to be done after stock is put away and pars are filled. Most of our centrals do them on the night shift when they can minimize the impact to the floors. Anything that comes in as "emergent" goes through the supervisor who can post-it note the bin.

Den,

We went live in December 2011 with MSCM and we use it for receiving, delivery, par counting and picking. I'm not sure you ever get paperless. The slogan for our 2008 go live with Lawson was "Purchasing goes Paperless" and it certainly seems like we create an awful lot of paper for a paperless system.

Although there is a learning curve, MSCM shouldn't take any longer to pick than a handheld requisition would. We struggle with staff who pick it first on paper and then input it into the HHT - we are trying to wean them of that habit since it skews productivity reporting and truly does take longer since they are doing it twice. The button that gives us the most trouble actually does make picking quicker - picking has a PULL ALL button that we can't remove. The staff click on pull all instead of entering the quantity which takes away one of our double checks for accuracy and can mess up the inventory counts if they didn't physically pull what they electronically said they did.

In Lawson, pre MSCM, our inventory coordinator had to make edits and release the WH32.2 (athough you can setup an automatic job to do it, we found that there were enough changes to not make it worthwhile for us). With MSCM, the staff is accountable for that themselves as the gun does the work for them - perhaps that is why it seems to take longer?

We haven't had any issues with issues or returns causing transactional difficulties. We did test it thoroughly before going live though, following transactions through Lawson until we were certain it was all working. Our inventory coordinators tend to prefer to do it in IC21 but have on occasion used the handhelf instead. It just depends on where they are and what information they have. If they have to look up the accounting unit, for example, they might as well just do it on the computer.

Cycle counting. Cycle Counting. Cycle counting. The bane of my existence. I detest Lawson's cycle counting "feature". After a couple of years of attempting to find the sweet spot in freezing inventory and counting everything at one time and even attempting weekly cycle counts of a group of high use or high dollar items (went through the inventory twice in the course of a year), we completly revised what we were doing. From the technical point of view, doing weekly cycle counts was screwing up the inventory quantities and we had freeze records that weren't unfrozen and it just wasn't pretty. Most of that is user errors but we were stuck with the people that we had doing it (on weekends when it is slower). it just seemed more complicated than it had to be.

We completely scrapped lawson's cycle count and instead do it using adjustments and one annual physical inventory. I download the stock on hand in Lawson before we begin and zero it all out. Then we count every item, compile it and we compare and recount anything that was missed or seems off (usually a unit of measure error in counting). Finally, an upload in MSAddins to bring in the new count and we're done. I realize its a more manual process than desired, but it is much less complex than using the POS that Lawson wrote.

We had handheld scanners (Metrologic) in our sterile processing department that are used for issues and returns - the scanner just scans the number, accepts a quantity and puts it into a text file. For several years, we used this for inventory in both sterile processing and our main storeroom. Recently, IT created an .asp page for me that allows us to use the MSCM handhelds. It goes to a web page then that displays every item counted and their quantities on hand. We have a report in the works as well to tell us which items were not counted.

So a very long answer to your questions - hope some of it is helpful!

Michelle

Two years after we went live with Lawson I ran a report on standard copy paper usage and compared those 2 years to the two years prior to Lawson. Usage jumped up significantly. There might have been other factors that contributed to this but it's been a running joke around here how Lawson has helped us to go paperless.

We're set up much like Kat. We don't use the handhelds to pick, issue or return. Just for par counting and cycle counts. Since moving to regular cycle counts we don't do year end PIs. Our storerooms are not 24/7 so cycle counts are done in the late afternoon just before the end of the business day. I would pick a time when it's slowest and tell staff to halt receiving of stock POs and finish current picking. After those shipments are released then run the freeze.

Thanks everyone. Very interesting. For the folks who do not use MSCM for picking, what is your process for releasing and closing orders? Is that a manual process through WH32.1 or 32.2?

Yes, we finish and release in WH32.2

WH190 will release ranges of shipments as well. Otherwise, yes - the WH32s.