Almyta Systems - Tutorial - Third Party Logistics

In this tutorial we are going to cover using the Almyta Control System for kitting, i.e. assembling different inventory items into one package.

The situation is this: the Order Fulfillment Center has an inventory of 10 000 Sampler Acme Toothpaste tubes, 15 000 Sample Acme Floss Packs, 30 000 Sampler Acme Toothbrushes, 100 000 Acme promotional coupons, 1 000 parcel boxes, 1 000 postage labels, and 1000 ft. packaging tape. The Order Fulfillment Center’s client, Acme Supply Company, supplied the toothpaste, floss, brushes, and coupons. The parcel boxes, postage labels, and packaging tape were supplied by Staples.

We are to create a kit that includes 10 Toothpaste tubes, 15 Floss packs, 30 toothbrushes, and 100 coupons, and is packaged in 1 box, with 1 label, in 1 foot of tape. We are to make 1 000 of these kits and send them back to our client the Acme Supply Company, thus fulfilling their Order #123456.

Let us input this data into the Almyta Control System. We will use dark blue color for instructions and gray color for commentary.

Open the Almyta Control System by clicking the Windows Start button, going to Programs, finding the Almyta folder and clicking on Almyta Control System. The Almyta Control System Company Selector will appear. Double-click on , then click Yes to create a new company with a clean data set. Enter "Order Fulfillment Center" as the company name and click OK. (Here and elsewhere, enter data without the quotes used in this guide.) When the next screen pops up, click Yes to open the new database. Click the Exit button to close the Initialize Data screen that has appeared.

We must turn on kitting functionality in the System.

Select System from the bar menu at the top of the program window and go to Administrative Tools/Options. Go to the Shipping/Issues tab and put a checkmark in the Support for kits when shipping box, then click OK and OK again.

Now, select Inventory from the bar menu at the top of the program window and click on Item Master List. The blank Inventory Item Master List screen appears.

Click the yellow plus sign at the top of the Inventory Item Master List screen to create a new Item ID. Type in "toothpaste" and click OK. Click on the yellow pencil icon next to the Main Supplier field and click OK. Click the yellow plus sign on the Suppliers screen that appears to create a new Supplier ID. Type in "Acme Supply" and click OK.

Although Acme Supply Co. is our client, in Almyta Control System we treat it as a Main Supplier because we receive inventory from it. Later we will also treat it as a Customer, because we send assembled inventory back to it. Supplier and Customer are distinct categories in Almyta Control System. We will treat the Acme Supply Co. sometimes as one, sometimes as the other according to the function the Co. serves in that particular situation.

Fill out the fields on the screen. For example, Company Name: "Acme Supply Company", Primary Contact: " John Rutgers", etc. When you’re done with Acme Supply, use the yellow plus sign at the top screen to create a "Staples" Supplier record, and fill out some information for Staples as well. Exit the screen . Now right click on the Main Supplier field and Refresh, then select ACME SUPPLY from the list and click Yes. Now click on the Stocking Properties tab that you can see right above the Category field and spot the Location field, the one that currently says DOCK. Go ahead and fill it with "BIN #1" instead by using the yellow pencil icon to create that entry, then Refreshing the field and selecting the new entry from it. Then put a checkmark in the Item is a make checkbox (!IMPORTANT-YOU MUST DO THIS FOR KITTING TO WORK!) Finally, go back to the Item Header tab we were on before.

You will notice that there is a field, near the bottom of the screen, that says "select operation". This is a dropdown list. Open it and select "Copy this record into a new one", then click the Yes button. Type in "floss" and click OK. A new inventory item, identical to the first one you entered but labeled Yuban instead of Folgers, now exists. Use the Copy function to create five more copies, and give them the following IDs: "brush", "coupon", "box", "label", and "tape".

All the Items we are going to need have been created. Almost the last thing we must do on the Item Master List screen is change the Main Supplier of the box, label, and tape items to Staples.

Use the ID dropdown list at the top of the Inventory Item Master List screen to go to each of the three Staples items in turn, those being BOX, LABEL, and TAPE. On each screen, change the Main Supplier field to read STAPLES.

Now we will create the kit as an inventory item. We will call it "ACME-123456 KIT" to represent the Order number it is being created to fulfill.

Click the yellow plus sign to create a new Item ID: "ACME-123456 KIT". Go to the Stocking Properties tab and check the Item is a make box. Now select Components (detail view/modify) from the "select operation" dropdown list. Click the Add button and type "too" for toothbrush into the New Component screen, then click OK, select "TOOTHPASTE" in the one-item list that appears, and click Select. TOOTHPASTE appears on the Components screen. Change the Units field next to it to read "10", since there are to be 10 toothpaste tubes per kit. Click Add again and type in "flo" this time, using the same procedure as above and entering 15 into the Units field next to the FLOSS ID. Keep going in this same manner—"bru" for BRUSH, "cou" for COUPON, and so on. Enter 30 into the Units field for BRUSH, 100 for COUPON, 1 for BOX, 1 for LABEL, and 1 for TAPE. When you are done with this, Exit the screen.

Now the Almyta Control System knows what is included in an ACME-123456 KIT. We must go ahead and create stock for our inventory items, so that there will be units to put in the kits.

Click on the yellow plus sign in the row of icons near the top of the Almyta Control System. The Receive Inventory screen appears. Open the Item ID field dropdown list and select "TOOTHPASTE". Notice that the system by default assumes that you wish to receive one unit of TOOTHPASTE. Since we have 10 000 units of TOOTHPASTE in stock, type "10000" into the Units field. Then select "Warehouse appointment receive" from the Adj. Code dropdown list in the upper right corner of the screen.

We are telling the System that all the items we are about to receive came in by way of a warehouse appointment.

A second record, empty, has appeared below TOOTHPASTE. Select "FLOSS" from the dropdown list and enter "15000" into the Units field. Keep going in the same manner, entering "BRUSH" and "30000", "COUPON" and "100000", "BOX" and "1000", "LABEL" and "1000", and "TAPE" and "1000". When you are done click the Receive button, then Exit the Receive Inventory screen

If you go now to Inventory/Inventory Fast Browse/Active Items through the menus, you will see that all the units just received are now listed as being in stock. Alternately, going through the different Item IDs on the Inventory Item Master List screen (with the Item Header tab displayed), one will see that all items except ACME-123456 KIT now display the proper number of in-stock units.

The last thing to do is assemble 1 000 kits and ship them back to Acme Supply Co. Remember when we said that Acme Supply was going to sometimes be treated as a Supplier, sometimes a Customer? We will now treat it as a Customer, since a Customer to Almyta Control System is the entity to which we ship inventory.

Go to Purchasing/Suppliers through the menus. On the Suppliers screen, ACME SUPPLY has appeared (since we only bought from Staples, but will not ship anything back to it, we are no longer concerned with the STAPLES Supplier ID). Click the Copy to Customer button at the bottom of the screen, and type in "ACME-123456" instead of keeping the same ACME SUPPLY ID. Click OK. Exit the Bill To/Ship To Address screen that has appeared.

For convenience, we have simply copied the our client (Acme Supply Co.)’s information over into a new "Customer" field that bears both the name of the client company, and the number of the order we were handling. It is easy to handle large numbers of orders and to find specific orders if each assembly order is represented as a new Customer. For example, when Order #1234567 comes in from the same client, we can just go to the Bill To screen, select Item ID ACME-123456, click the Copy to New button, and call the copy ACME-123457.

Now, go to Shipping/Order Processing through the menus. The Order Processing screen appears. Use the yellow plus sign to create a new blank Order. Refresh the Bill To and Ship To fields and select ACME-123456 from both dropdown lists. Also enter a Shipping Date—for example, tomorrow’s date. Then go to the Line Items tab. There is a dropdown list field on this tab called "Kit #". Select ACME-123456 KIT from the dropdown list and type "1000" into the Units field next to it. Click anywhere else on the screen, and Almyta Control System automatically fills in the number of each of the different components that is needed to create 1 000 kits.

That is how we create Kits in Almyta Control System. Now let us just pretend that the Shipping Date has arrived, and that we can now Issue the Order.

Click the Issue button at the bottom-left of the screen. Click the Load All button, then Yes to automatically fill out all the Wrhe. Location fields on the "Issuing against shipping order" screen. Then, click the 2. Issue button, and OK.

If you now go to Inventory/Inventory Fast Browse/Active Items, you will find that there is nothing left in stock. We have shipped all our inventory, packaged, back to the Client.