COMPUTER-AIDED ITEM SELECTION FOR THE CYCLE COUNTING PROCEDURE

摘要

In order to achieve and maintain a high level of inventory accuracy, companies (especially Third Party Logistics providers - 3PL) choose to continuously count item quantities. This process, called cycle counting, is well known and widely accepted. There are many techniques, such as geographic, ranking, random, etc., developed to determine what items to count and when to count. Those techniques are usually customized for the particular organization/warehouse and usually embedded into an existing application. Such approach is not suitable for the 3PL providers due to conflicting interests of different clients. The purpose of this article is to present a different approach to cycle counting rules and item selections. It introduces a new technique that has improved item selection and is based on the users' manageable rules. The main benefits of the new approach are: a much higher operational flexibility, business rules independent of programming (data driven processes), selection of the best candidates for cycle counting and higher inventory accuracy achieved with less labor. To compare standard item selection and the proposed new approach, we analyzed the item transaction history since year 2001 for a specific 3PL. Results showed that the standard approach returned in this period about 5% items for counting too early. The proposed approach shows improvements for these 5% cases, returning either a fewer number of items or a different list of items, and resulting in direct cost savings, better accuracy, and faster cycles.