Reconciling Parts in Shop

[Gary J. Naples]

I have a client using parts storage cabinets in the shop for quick service access. It's a busy shop. As is the case, reconciliation is necessary to keep O.H. quantities accurate and maintain accountability. Since this is considered a consignment inventory, count is maintained by either the Parts Department or Service Department. In this case it's the Parts Department. At this time, the parts personnel are conducting a perpetual inventory (basically bin checks) of these parts and comparing quantities, and of course, billing the difference to the Service Department. Parts in the cabinet include oil filters, fluids, wiper inserts/blades, air filters, cabin filters, batteries and some other misc. items. Reconciliation has to be conducted frequently and becomes intrusive to normal operations. Parts Managers I've discussed this with are of two minds. Either they use the aforementioned process or they don't trust locating parts in the shop. Does anyone have any additional suggestions to facilitate the reconciliation process?

[possum]

I've had this situation in my shop before as well, but just oil filters. We only kept one of each filter out there, and as the tech turned in the RO, he would bring us the box tab to bill the filter and get a replacement. Other store I've hear they bill the entire "shop" inventory on a open counter ticket, and as the parts get sold, they get a replacement delivered by Parts. That way you always know what's in the "shop" inventory, cause it on an open invoice. At end of month, whatever is left is inventoried, and if its all there, that ticket is voided and a new one started with fresh inventory. Anything missing is billed to shop supplies, and the Service manager is involved in the entire process. His techs need to call Parts and get the parts on the RO's, or the Advisors have to catch it. If they want inventory, they have to be held accountable.

[JJS]

We have a stack of consignment cabinet sheets in each of the rolling consignment cabinets; one for each of the 6 Service teams. The techs check off what they used and how many, listing the Repair Order number, the job number and their initials. They turn that in to us to bill it out, after we do we replace it. If the repair order is already closed we contact the writer to re-open it, if it's too late it gets billed as a shortage and we replenish the parts in the cabinet. At the end of each day we inventory the cabinets and bill Service for any shortages and discrepancies that can't be resolved. The consignment cabinet parts are are not reflected as being on my inventory, I don't want a customer coming in for something and finding out it's not on our shelf, it's out in the shop. We reconcile it as a dollar amount when we do inventory. The sheets are clearly labeled so the tech only has to put a quantity and line number, he doesn't need to deal with the actual part number. An example would be he took 2 of line number 37 on the sheet. We have a small number on the same line that tells us in parts how many the cabinet should have in it. In the morning we roll them back out to the shop 100% full and start over. The whole process maybe takes 30 minutes for all 6 cabinets.