What is the MR Queue?

Following the submission of a Material Request (MR), is step #2 in the Procurement Process - Processing the MR Queue.

This step is sort of a triage, that allows the person responsible for procuring the items to determine whether the items necessary for your scope of work:

1. Need to be placed on a Purchase Order to one or more vendors,

2. Are already on-hand; and available, in which case you can ‘Allocate from Inventory’,

3. Are readily available from ‘Stock’, such as screws, glue, sandpaper (consumables).

Open

1. Navigate to the ‘POs’ form found in the Purchasing/Inventory group on your ribbon menu.

2. Select the MR tab.

3. Arrange the table’s columns any way you’d like (learn more here)
   (Note: for this example, we’re basically looking at “What’s needed?”, and “Do we have any available, or do we need to order some?”)

Open

4. When you right-click on any row in the MR Queue, a pop-up context menu will open. Here, you have the options to place the selected item on a Purchase Order, Allocate from Inventory (think: ‘On-hand AND ‘Available’), or Use Stock.
   
   

    

    

Adding Items to a Purchase Order

1. Pay particular attention to the quantities in the ‘AVL’ column. A blank column indicates this item has never been ordered before. A value of zero means it’s been ordered before, but there aren’t any available to fulfill this request. In either case, these items here need to be placed on a Purchase Order. Your two options are to ‘Add to Current PO’ or ‘Add to New PO’.
   
   

    

2. Right-click on any item that you want to add to a purchase order. If you already have a current purchase order prepared for a vendor, but haven’t submitted it yet, you can choose to ‘Add to Current PO’. Otherwise, select ‘Add to PO’. Click here to go to Purchase Orders.
   
   

Allocating From Inventory

1. When you have enough items available (AVL) to fulfill the desired quantity (Qty), you can allocate the items from inventory. In this example, each of the quantities available are more than enough to satisfy the desired quantity. The ‘OH’ (On-hand) column indicates the number of items ‘in-the-building’, so-to-speak, but as you can see by the delta between AVL and OH, many of the items on-hand are already allocated to other projects.
   
   

   
   
   

2. Right-click any item in the MR Queue and select ‘Allocate Inventory’.
   
   

3. Specify from which available inventory lot you want to allocate from. (Note: In this example, the material is the same. It’s just stored on two separate racks. So, we’ll pull the five (5) available on the rack at Location-1-A1, and 10-of-19 available from Location -1-A2. You might also see the same material on more than one row here, when the material was purchased at different price points).

4. Add a note (optional - Adds a note in the Inventory Transaction log).

5. Move the allocated items to a different location within your building (optional, as necessary)

6. Click ‘OK’ when ready.
   
   

    

What if there is a quantity available,
but my required quantity is greater?

When there is a positive number available in the ‘AVL’ column, but the quantity you need for your scope of work is greater than what’s available, you need to split the record.

Spitting the record will create a second identical record, except quantities will be different. So, in this example above, we’ll split the record, and in doing so, we’ll indicate that we need a quantity of six (6), that will subsequently be placed on a purchase order.

Once we have two separate records, we can ‘Allocate Inventory’ for three (3) from inventory and add six (6) to a purchase order by either ‘Add to Current PO’, or ‘Add to New PO’, thus satisfying the required quantity of nine (9) total.

To split an MR request:

1. Right click on the row to open the pop-up context menu.

2. Select ‘Split Record’.
   
   

    

3. Enter the quantity that needs to be put onto a purchase order.

4. Click ‘OK’.

   What once was a single record with a required quantity of nine (9) is now two separate records; one record for a quantity of three (3), and one for a quantity of (6).
   
   

5. Select the row with the required quantity of six (6) and ‘Add to Current PO, or 'Add to New PO’.

6. Select the row with the required quantity of three (3) and ‘Allocate Inventory’.

Use Stock

1. Items that are identified with a checkmark in the ‘Stock’ column can be pulled from parts/materials that your organization keeps on-hand and restocks frequently, but are not typically, precisely accounted for when it comes to the quantity, volume, or linear feet consumed.
   
   Items such as screws and shelf pins are typically purchased in bulk (e.g., a box of 1,500 screws).
   
   In this example below, the bulk boxes of 1,500 the screws come in are tracked in inventory.
   
   However, when consuming smaller quantities of these items out of the bulk boxes, we are using ‘Stock’.
   
   Other good examples of ‘Stock’ items are dowels, glue, bundles of shop rags, rubber bumpers, cork, and bubble wrap.
   
   

    

    

2. Right-click any row in the MR Queue that has the ‘Stock’ checkmark selected and select ‘Use Stock’ from the pop-up context menu.
   
   

    

Check Stock

As with any inventory system, it’s only as good as the data people enter to keep the system accurate and up to date.

When materials are received-in, the ‘On-hand’ and ‘Available’ quantities in your inventory will go up. Conversely, when items are consumed/used for a project, the numbers in your inventory will go down.

The ‘Check Stock’ option is a safety net feature that allows the Purchasing Agent to request that someone confirm that the reported quantity in the inventory is accurate. (Think: Trust, but verify)

When you select an item in your MR Queue and then select the ‘Check Stock’ option, you’ll need to provide a ‘Due Date’. Ideally, this due date should be sometime before the necessary ‘Order By’ date.

1. Enter your desired ‘Due Date’ or click the down arrow on the right side of the field to pull-up a calendar date selector, and select a date from the calendar.
   
   

    

2. Enter a Note (optional)

3. Click OK.

The selected item disappears from your MR Queue and gets sent to the ‘Stock Check’ Queue on the Inventory form. In larger organizations, someone in the warehouse is often tasked with checking the stock check queue a few times each day.

To get to the ‘Stock Check’ Queue:

1. Navigate to the Inventory form.

2. Select the ‘Stock Check’ tab.

3. Once the item count has been confirmed, right Click the desired item in the stock-check list, then choose from one of three options on the pop-up context menu:

   1. Allocate from Inventory.

   2. Use Stock.

   3. Push Back to MR Queue
      
      

      If the stock check resulted in the option to ‘Push Back to MR Queue’, it exits the Stock Check Queue and is returned to the MR Queue where the item is designated with an alert icon. This indicates that the quantity shown in the inventory will not satisfy the needed quantity, and the Purchasing Agent can add that item to a purchase order.