Item Troubleshooting

A list of commonly experienced issues and questions related to items and inventory and step-by-step solutions to solve them.

Items are the backbone of any warehousing operation. Without inventory, operations come to a screeching halt. For this reason, it is extremely important not only to understand your inventory and its trends, but also to organize your inventory appropriately and understand how Infoplus recognizes inventory in different scenarios. This article will lay out some common solutions related to items and inventory. 

How to Use This Guide

Below, you will find multiple different scenarios that could potentially cause issues for items/inventory in Infoplus. You can use the table of contents below to quickly navigate to the exact question you are interested in. Each issue has multiple troubleshooting steps to help you independently get to the bottom of the issue you are experiencing and solve it so you can move forward with your operations. 

Table of Contents: 

1. How do substitutions work in Infoplus?
2. Why does my item have a negative orderable quantity?
3. Why does my item still say X amount of Orderable Quantity when I know there is nothing available?
4. The SKU for my order shows a 0, but it is still allocated. Why didn’t I get an alert saying this order was un-allocatable?
5. Why is my item that I know is low stock not showing the low stock status in Infoplus?
6. My item has a negative orderable quantity, but the Total Demand field shows there is quantity available. What does this mean?
   
   

How do substitutions work in Infoplus?

If you want a different item to get delivered to your customer when they place an order for item A, then you can set up substitution, either temporarily or permanently. 

The item you use to substitute item A need to already exist in Infoplus before setting up the substitution on the Substitution Table. 

Notes About Substitutions: 

• When you set up a substitution for an order, the available quantity for the substitution item is added to the Inventory Terms you will see on the original SKU (item A), such as Orderable Quantity, Open PO Quantity, Total Demand, In Fulfillment Process Quantity, etc. 
• If you create a substitution on an item that is already currently on order, that order's fulfillability details will not be updated. However, you will still be able to run the order through fulfillment successfully.
• More about substitutions in Infoplus

Why does my item have a negative orderable quantity?

There are multiple reasons for this. The most simple is you have open backorders for an item. If an item has 0 QTY & is ordered, Orderable QTY will be negative. 

Another reason you might see a negative orderable quantity on an item is that the item is a part of a substitution. 

When this occurs, the item has an indirect demand because the item that substitutes for this item has open orders. 

The SKU that shows the negative orderable quantity is due to the substitute SKU. 

The substitution SKU is taking into account the orders for itself and for the SKU it is substituting.

Why does my item still say X amount of Orderable Quantity when I know there is nothing available?

Substitutions are tied to this order and it is pulled from the inventory for the substitution. 

If an item has a substitution tied to it, the orderable quantity includes both the original SKU and the one that it can substitute for.

The SKU for my order shows a 0, but it is still allocated. Why didn’t I get an alert saying this order was un-allocatable?

The most likely cause of this is that the particular SKU has a substitution assigned to it and the system automatically fulfilled the order using the substitution SKU, which did have inventory available. 

Why is my item that I know is low stock not showing the low stock status in Infoplus?

In Infoplus, there is a setting called Stock Status on each item record. Stock Status is where you can tell the system at which point you would want the system to notify you that you have low stock for a specific SKU. However, it takes three business days for an item to change to low stock status after it has hit this threshold. 

So we recommend setting the Stock Status at slightly higher than you would originally want to see. 

You can not use Stock Status entirely to avoid the 3 day wait for the status to update. Instead, you can use a smart filter and trigger to send an email or add a tag that an item is below a certain quantity.

Or you can add a metric to your dashboard and running a daily report (add KB to metrics and reports)

If you have an open PO for the item that is in the Low Stock status (or below a certain quantity), the low stock status will be taken off the SKU given it is in the process of being replenished.

My item has a negative orderable quantity, but the Total Demand field shows there is quantity available. What does this mean?

Even if the item itself doesn’t have available quantity, there is a substitution set up for this item that does have available quantity. 

Total Demand is related to substitutions and/or to Kit components. Total Demand is your on-hand quantity minus your orderable quantity. 

• Ex: Total Demand will show on the item that is set up to substitute for another item. This means there is indirect demand for the item in your warehouse even though the order table will not show that specific item is being used for the order. This is the same logic for kits as well.  

You can check to see if an item has a substitution assigned to it by checking the 'Substitute With' tab at the bottom of the item record.

Whenever an item is ordered, it immediately tallies in Total Demand. If an item lives on a KOD, it tallies in Total Demand. If Kit is not KOD, it will not tally in Total Demand.