ABOUT SERIAL NUMBER TRACKING

The Serial Number Tracking feature enables you to store serial numbers in Unleashed and attach them to related products. You have the ability mark specified products as ‘Serialized’, and then track those ‘Serialized’ products with serial numbers on every transaction. This provides you with better transparency and greater control over the lifecycle of your product and allows you to have greater tracking across all of your transactions in Unleashed.

WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THIS PROCESS?

Suppliers:  Suppliers need to be setup and created before you can receipt in serialized products.

Purchases: When you enable the Serialized Products feature and you have already purchases already in Unleashed, then those existing purchase orders are not affected. However, if you create a new purchase order from scratch, then you can attach both products and serialized products to the new purchase order.

Supplier Returns: When you return a serialized product to a Supplier, you need to select what serial numbers are being returned. This is limited to the serial numbers you purchased unless the product was not serialized at the time of purchase.

Receipt Purchase: You can add or remove serial numbers to and from the specified purchase order.
Warehouse Transfers: You can move serial numbers from one warehouse location with another (as long as they are not being used elsewhere). These serial numbers must be completed before you can assign and then move them.

Stock Take: You can optionally view what serial number(s) you are supposed to have in your warehouse when you are performing a stock count. You can also print those serial numbers and adjust stock levels during a perpetual stock count, simply by adding or removing serial numbers.

Stock Adjustments: You can create a stock adjustment for a serialized product, you can also view the serial number in a column that is displayed on the adjustment.

Sales/Shipments: From the available Sales and Shipment pages you have the option to select serial numbers that you want to ship.

Credits: You can create credits and filter serial numbers attached to the specified sales order that is being credited.

Customers: From the Customer pages; you have the option to select serial numbers that you want to ship.

COMMON ISSUES

  • Difficulty assigning serial numbers to raw materials, finished goods, and final products.
  • Experience difficulty differentiating between goods with different uses.
  • Difficulty managing serial number assignment during production to track product quality.
  • Difficulty following up on after-sales services, tracking defective products, and identifying defective materials.
  • Lack of system in place to create, assign, and track serial numbers from raw materials to after-sales services.
  • With GUAVA ERP, users can assign items with a unique serial number, manage them separately, and can be applied to purchasing, sales, production, and after-sales service.

BENEFITS

  • Assigning items unique serial numbers makes it easy to manage and track item history.
  • Generate serial numbers in less time through the program, batches, Excel, or Notepad.
  • Easily search inventory movement through sales, purchases, returns, manufacturing or after-sales service by serial number.
  • Integrated system reduces data entry associated with inventory movement.
  • Ability to search inventory books and track inventory movement solely through serial numbers.
  • Analyze inventory movement and sales based by serial number.
  • Use with after-sales management to track defective products, bad suppliers, and processes.

PROS AND CONS OF SERIALIZATION

Whether your business chooses to track serial numbers or not is a tough decision. The answer is only made clear for you when the products you sell require serialization. If you sell smartphones, firearms, or laptops, this decision has already been made. Otherwise, the decision to track serial numbers rests on the advantages for you.

If tracking individual units of a product is not immediately necessary, consider skipping serialization. The theoretical benefits of this fine-tuned tracking may not be worth the added time and effort needed. In other cases, you can avoid requiring serialization by offering a simpler proof of purchase to your customers.