Business Central: Why do we need Item tracking and how do I set it up?

Introduction:

In today’s booming supply-chain industry, it has become very important to track Item/part No’s for various companies.

Why do we need Item tracking ?

• If we could track a small part(Item) from manufacturing to assembling to be a ready finish product we could plan our sales and production effectively.
• Our forecast reports can be more accurate if we had our tracker on each product we manufacture.
• It increases transparency in the system. At any given time, we can track the Item, when did it enter our inventory and the current position of the Item.
• In case of any defective component, we can easily track where was it assembled and if we are having assigned tracker for the defective components we can easily reject the complete lot before it causes further damage to other components.

In Business central, we use Serial No. and Lot No.’s to track Items.

Serial No.’s are used in machinery and electronic equipment’s and Lot No’s are used for food and medical products where we can use Lot No with expiration date.

There are 3 types of Item tracking

• Inbound Item tracking
• Outbound Item tracking
• Internal Item tracking

Lets check out, how to set the tracking codes in Business central and how will we track our Inbound, outbound and internal transactions.

1. Navigate to the search bar and type in Item tracking codes

2. The below are the default Item tracking codes. Let’s concentrate on specific tracking codes as they are widely used in the supply chain industry

3. Click on the new button to create a tracking code of your choice. In the below example I’m creating Serial No with Warehouse tracking.

4. If we enable SN Specific tracking, it enabled most of the Inbound and Outbound tracking. If we require Warehouse tracking, we need to manually enable it

5. Warehouse tracking is beneficial if we have warehouse management in our company where warehouse employees can assign Serial No’s while picking items or while receiving items in the Warehouse receipt. For Locations with Warehouses, it’s advised to enable Warehouse tracking.

6. You can also enable SN. No Info Must exist but this is an optional field. With this field enabled it will be mandatory to enable serial No. information.

7. Lot No tracking can be also enabled similarly but here expiration date can be applied

8. To assign Item tracking No. to the Item, navigate to Items and under Item tracking and attach the new Item tracking code and voila! the set up is complete.

Thanks for reading!

I’ll be back with my next blog where I’ll explore various types of Inbound, Outbound and Internal tracking.. .. stay safe, stay positive!