Handling Lost and/or Missing Items

Content was last updated in 06.23.07-00

Revision History

Equipment are the key revenue enablers in a Lease, Rental, and Sale business. If an equipment is considered as Lost or Missing by the business, it can directly impacts it financially.

Though a Missing equipment is considered as a temporary status-quo and does not reflect in the accounting system. It is just hat those number of items can no longer be rented or sold.

However, a Lost equipment have a direct impacts as they removed from the financial records itself and has a negative impact (counted as inventory loss as well) in the finance books.

Returning or Re-instating a Lost or Missing inventory Item

An item that was being considered as Lost or Missing until now, might be found later, and needs to re-instated back in the business inventory.

In R2, this can be done either Manually or by using a batch scan. And in both methods, this can be done with or without an authorization or user prompt.

Both Lost and Missing items can be returned using any of the 3 ways to return an item in R2.

1. Return Order Window

2. Batch Return

3. Intelligent Returns

When the user batch scans and auto-returns a 'Missing' equipment:

• It is directly returned to inventory because it has not been removed from the financial records.

When the user batch scans and auto-returns a 'Lost' equipment:

• it would need an authorization to be reinstate, as the item has been removed from accounting system

Configurational Settings: Handling Lost or Missing Items, the intelligent way

Go to R2 > Configuration > Warehouse and you would see the following options.

As a default, for both Lost or Missing Items, 'Allow Return' and 'Auto Return on Scan' are unselected..

So, under this setting, no Lost or Missing item can be returned through any means.

Also, Only if, 'Allow Return' and/or 'Auto Return on Scan' is enabled, then the corresponding setting - 'Ask Confirmation' gets enabled.

Thus, there is a possibility to return a Lost or Missing item, without any prompt to being shown to you.

In the 'Batch Return Detail' window, R2 retains the following (existing) behavior:

System does not allow to Scan and Fill a Lost or Missing item, when it is scanned using the Asset ID.

At this point the system shows a 'Notification Message' that Item was not found on any Order. And this behavior is irrespective whether the above flags are Enabled or Disabled. 

As mentioned above, shown below are the screenshot of 'Notification Error Messages' when despite the flag being enabled/disabled, the system is unable to complete the return process.

We will now explore various steps that involve in returning a Lost or Missing Item using either of the 3 methods discussed above, and proceeding with or without a prompt or notification.

However, In either case the steps could be same, the only difference lies in choosing either a Lost or Missing item.

Consider the following Pre-requisite for the Sample Workflow

1. We are using the Order ID: Order-1548

2. The above order has some Assets added related to the Product ID: 19956S (Serial Item) with the below mentioned statuses.

• Asset ID: 19956s-3 (Status = Lost).

• Asset ID: 19956S-18 and 19956S-27 (Status = Missing).

Sample Workflow:

• Lost Items

• Missing Items

When Force Fill = True and the following conditions match...

1. Items's status = Lost/Missing in Other Sites'.

2. 'Auto Return' is Set as 'True' for the corresponding case of Lost/Return.

R2 would 'Allow' it with or without prompt.

 

When Force Fill = True and the following conditions match...

1. Items's status = Lost/Missing in Other Sites'.

2. 'Auto Return' is Set as 'FALSE' for the corresponding case of Lost/Return.

R2 would 'Not Allow' it with or without prompt.

 

When Force Fill = False and the following conditions match...

1. 'Auto Return' is Set as 'TRUE'.

R2 would 'Not Allow' anyhow.