The most important part of your market data is making sure your inventory count is correct. There are several tools and automatic mechanisms in AMS that you can use to help accurately manage your market inventory.
- Min/Max Par Level—When new products are created, by default the restocking mechanism is set up to use the min/max par level. Product min/max par levels are the most common method used to restock products in your market. The min/max par levels are best used for longer shelf-life items such as candy, soda, and chips. However, you can use this min/max par level method for fresh food, depending on your operation. When a product is set up using the min/max par level, and a product inventory level drops below that defined minimum par level, a restock will trigger.
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Economic Order Quantity—This Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) is a rounding rule for the restocking mechanism. The EOQ rule is great for restocking full boxes of product in the market. For example, a box of Snickers has a 48 count. If you set up the min/max at 8/48 and flag the EOQ at 48, the restock will call for a full box of Snickers once the on-hand quantity (OHQ) drops below 8 Snickers. You can also use the EOQ rule to call beverages in quantities of 6,12,24, and other similar amounts.
IMPORTANT: Make sure to set up your products correctly and understand the purpose of the product EOQ.
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Scheduled Products—Use the schedule products tool to manage fresh food. Scheduling products must be updated at the market location and cannot be done at the ORG level. Once you set up products as a scheduled product, use the scheduled inventory grid view or use the CSV import tool to manage the static schedule. Using these scheduling tools minimizes driver/route errors and rework, which saves time.
IMPORTANT: Scheduled Products mechanism is the critical set-up process to utilizing the food scheduling tool.
Physical Inventory Best Practices
Consider performing the following best practices:
- Regular monthly inventories. Do these once each month for each market location.
- Full market inventories using the AMS Physical Inventory tool. This enables you to use the Not Inventoried Today feature, which can correct any market inventory discrepancies.
- Full market inventories will provide more information, which helps identify whether the inventory discrepancies are due to theft or warehouse miss-picks. Partial inventories are not nearly as effective as performing a full market inventory. Partial inventories are just larger scaled spot-checks.
- Using the Quick Stale or Quick Restock function on the kiosk is typically much more efficient than using the tablet for smaller product adjustments.
- Using the tablet to perform full inventories is more efficient, since the driver does not need to walk repeatedly to the kiosk to adjust individual products.
- Product adjustments are best made using the tablet during meal times, since you will not interrupt customers from purchasing their items.
- Most importantly, your entire team needs to understand how all the product adjustment descriptions are used. This is key for data integrity.
Adjusting Inventory using AMS
- Start by logging into AMS, mms.mykioskworld.com.
- Once you are logged in, open the Inventory dropdown and select Adjustment.
- Select the location you would like to inventory.
- Select the product you would like to adjust.
- Once selected, choose your reason for adjustment by choosing the Reason for Adjustment dropdown.
- Add the number of how much you are adjusting it by, and click Update Inventory.