Inventory management

Inventory granularity

Inventory dimensions

In Hubble, Inventory is tracked with a low granularity, which includes the 5 below dimensions:

• SKU: basic unit to track stock, representing a similar version of a commercial product (see SKU definition on Wikipedia)
• Warehouse: represents a place where is stored the physical stock
• Owner: reason to dedicate stock for a specific sales channel, or a business unit who owns the stock
• Lot or S/N: if the stock is tracked by production lot or production serial numbers
• Expiry date: if the stock has an expiry or best before date

TERMINOLOGY

The stock given for a set of these 5 dimensions is called a Stock Line. A Stock Line is then the lowest granularity of stock tracking in Hubble.

Inventory positions

A Stock Line is composed within 4 stock positions:

• Incoming: an inbound order is created, but the stock is not received yet.
• Available: stock is available for sales.
• Allocated: an outbound order is created and the stock is reserved for such order.
• Blocked: the stock is blocked for some reason (damaged, expired), hence not available for sales.

Stock on hand is the stock counted inside the 4 walls of a warehouse. Therefore is it the sum of Available, Allocated and Blocked

Example

SKU	Warehouse	Owner	Lot or S/N	Expiry date	Incoming	Available	Allocated	Blocked	Stock on Hand
A001	Bonded Warehouse	Common	L2023001	01/08/2025	100	178	20	2	200
A001	Non-bonded Warehouse	B2C stock	L2023001	01/08/2029	0	50	12	0	62
A001	Non-bonded Warehouse	B2B stock	L2023001	01/08/2029	0	120	0	0	120
B001	Bonded Warehouse	Common	L2023087	01/03/2027	1200	0	0	0	0

The above stock has 4 stock lines.

• SKU A001 (3 lines) is:
  • in Bonded warehouse, with incoming quantities (100 from factory for example), allocated quantities (20 for an export order for example) and locked quantities (2 pieces were damaged on the last reception)
  • in Non-bonded warehouse
    • part of the stock is dedicated to to B2C, and 12 pieces are reserved for some ecom orders not shipped yet
    • part of the stock is dedicated to to B2B, all orders have been shipped.
  • SKU B001 is a new SKU, with 1200 pieces expected from the factory

Inventory Transactions

A transaction records a stock change, and any stock change will be recorded by a transaction.

A transaction is directly linked to a Stock Line, and therefore will record a change on a given SKU, warehouse, owner, lot or S/N and expiry date.

The recorded change could be either a move from a position to another one, either an adjustment on one of the position (plus or minus).

TRANSACTION IS HISTORY

Transactions are frozen data: transactions are written once by Hubble, and can never be changed later on.

The movements between positions could be due to one of the below scenarios.

Order flow

For a typical order flow, IN and OUT from a warehouse:

1. When an inbound order is created, the stock is tracked as incoming to warehouse: + Incoming
2. When an inbound order is received, the stock becomes available for sales: - Incoming & + Available
3. When an outbound order is created, the stock is allocated: - Available & + Allocated
4. When an outbound order is shipped, the stock is removed from Hubble: - Allocated

As exceptions:

5. When an inbound order is cancelled, the stock is untracked from incoming: - Incoming
6. When an outbound order is cancelled, the stock is de-allocated: - Allocated & + Available

Stock management

In case of stock management outside of order flow:

1. Positive adjustment: if some stock is found during stock-take: + Available
2. Negative adjustment: If some stock is lost during stock-take, some stock need to be destroyed (defective), ... : - Available
3. Block stock: The stock can't be sold temporarily or definitively (ex: quarantine, damaged, expired, end of season, ...): - Available & + Blocked
4. Release stock: The sock can be back to sales (ex: end of quarantine) - Available
5. Change dimension: It is also possible to have changes directly in the Available stock, in case of one of the dimension has to be changed, because of a wrong input at receiving:
   • SKU change
   • Owner change
   • Lot change
   • Expiry date change

tip

For more practical example of Stock Transactions, check a real example here