Inventory Pools

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Manage Inventory Pools, Consignment Transactions, and Custom Costing with Innovative and Efficient Pool Management Capabilities

Vista-Suite Enterprise enhances inventory and consignment management with feature-rich capabilities designed to address the most complex challenges of modern aviation MRO businesses. Why settle for outdated systems prone to inefficiencies and errors when Vista-Suite Enterprise empowers you with the tools to improve accuracy, streamline workflows, and drive profitability? From automated commission calculations linked to real-time inventory tracking to customizable Pool structures that adapt to your operational needs, Vista-Suite Enterprise gives you precise control over every detail. Consolidated dashboards, embedded audit logs, and advanced reporting features provide complete visibility, enabling faster, data-driven decisions. Whether you’re managing large consignment contracts, allocating repair costs, or tracking Pool performance, Vista-Suite Enterprise combines flexibility and reliability to optimize your inventory processes.

Pool (Lots) Management

Software systems traditionally require a primary inventory record to be assigned to a pool (Lot) to manage costs at the pool level. However, if you want to use the power of Inventory Pools to manage a group of inventory records that are not necessarily a Pool or Lot, you can do so with Vista-Suite Enterprise. The Generic Pool type option allows you to treat inventory regularly but still contain it within a Pool.

Most Inventory Lot systems restrict you to selling inventory on a single line item only from a single Lot. With Vista-Suite Enterprise Inventory Pools, you can mix and match regular, consigned, and non-consigned Pool inventory on a single line item. This vast and powerful time-saving tool takes the worry out of dealing with consignments or Pools and lets your salespeople do what they do best: SELL

Vista-Suite Enterprise Inventory Pool identifications let you show Pools as an Aircraft Pool, Engine Pool, APU Pool, Landing Gear Pool or Other. This allows you to identify the Pool package you are looking for easily.

Status codes are prevalent throughout Vista-Suite Enterprise, and Inventory Pools are no exception. This simple but powerful management piece allows you to identify a disposition, status, or other characteristic of the Pool for better visibility of its lifecycle.

Vista-Suite Enterprise's robust sales and agent management system allows you to assign these to individual Pools and will apply them to the sales order or quote line items whenever an inventory record for the Pool is selected.

When managing Pool inventory, it is very common to transfer inventory into or out of Pools. Vista-Suite Enterprise tracks this activity in special audit logs and alerts you if you are trying to move inventory into or out of Consigned Pools. This is important because it could represent a transfer of ownership!

Purchase orders can be an important part of Inventory Pools, especially with Vista-Suite Enterprise's Generic Pool capabilities. You may be using the Pools to manage goods at a remote facility and need a way to purchase replenishment stock for that Pool; with Vista-Suite Enterprise, it's easy. You can link any PO line item to an Inventory Pool, which will automatically be assigned upon receipt in the Logistics Order. But that's not all. You can also purchase the main Pool item itself. With the Deferred Pool setting, you can create a purchase order for the main Pool itself, and upon receipt, the Pool Header will link up with the item purchased to establish your new Pool. It's that easy!

The primary purpose of an Inventory Pool, or Lot, is to distribute the cost of a bulk purchase across the individual items when sold. This is done by specifying the percent of the sale price you want to apply as cost to the inventory item being sold. You can do that with Vista-Suite Enterprise Inventory Pools and so much more!

Inventory Pools can represent teardowns, large package purchases, consignments, or other bulk inventories. In many instances, you may want to record your staff labor hours and apply those costs to the Pool. With Vista-Suite Enterprise, this is possible using the Mobile App and its quick and easy labor recording feature.

You no longer have to manually apply the cost to piece parts from an inventory Pool. With Vista-Suite Enterprise, we use historical data to calculate the cost of a piece part item and apply it automatically for you!

Repair Order piece parts are a common element for aircraft part repairs. Repair Administrators are responsible for sending those piece parts with the main component, but if the main component or piece parts are consigned, it could cost you money! Vista-Suite Enterprise alerts you if you are trying to use consigned inventory for repair order piece parts that do not match the consignment of the unit being repaired.

Repairing items within an inventory Pool is commonplace. Still, with the complexity of Pools or Consignments, where those repair costs go could matter. That is why you can direct the repair costs for an inventory item to be applied to the cost of the Pool or retained against the inventory record that was repaired. This gives you the choice to manage it differently for each Pool you set up, and that is the flexibility you should expect from an Aviation ERP Software.

Pools can incur costs beyond their original acquisition or repair costs. With the Pool Charges feature, you can apply costs to Pools by adding charges for virtually anything. Freight, labor, duties, whatever the costs might be, we have you covered.

Sometimes, you need to adjust the cost of Pools up or down manually. You may manage your consignments differently or need to add or subtract costs to accommodate special circumstances. Manual cost adjustments are easy to make, and those adjustments are recorded in the adjustment logs for easy audit support.

The percentage of Pool, or Lot, will often change over time. You may want to assign 100% of the selling price to the cost in the early stages, then take profit later on. The problem with most systems is you cannot see what Pool Percentage was assigned for any given transaction. But not with Vista-Suite Enterprise. We track all characters of each transaction so you can see exactly how the cost was calculated at any given time. That frees you up to manage the Pool Cost Margins without worry.

We've talked a great deal about the user-defined fields system in Vista-Suite Enterprise. Well, Inventory Pools is no exception. You can create user-defined fields to track additional information against your Pool Headers. To learn more about this powerful feature, contact your sales representative immediately.

Consignments

Vista-Suite Enterprise has recognized this shortfall and addressed it in multiple ways. First, the commission calculations are driven by the same entity that groups and identifies ownership of the inventory, the Pool header. If an inventory record is moved out of the Pool, the user is warned, the consignment code is removed from the inventory record, the owner flag is turned off, and the owner is removed. Conversely, if inventory is moved into the Pool, the user is warned, and the consignment code, owner flag, and name are updated. This reduces the possibility of a consigned inventory record showing in one area of the system as sold on consignment because of the assigned code and not sold on consignment because it was moved out of the Lot, and vice versa.

Often, users are beholden to the software's calculations when creating transactions. But not with Vista-Suite Enterprise. With the proper user permissions, you can override the cost calculations or consignment commission calculations for inventory Pool transactions. This is very important and powerful so that adjustments can be made for one-off unique situations that require more or less cost to be adjusted for the Pool.

Vista-Suite Enterprise tracks commissions owed to your consignors within each Pool, and with a few clicks of a button, you can create purchase orders for one or more commission records. With options to consolidate into a single charge line or create PO line items for each corresponding commission sale, it is easy to manage the payments to your consignors.

Reporting to consignors can be daunting, and each consignor may want different details on their package. Vista-Suite Enterprise provides a comprehensive commission browse within each Pool and a system-wide commission browse across all Pools. With 48 data points, it covers just about anything your consignor may want to know.

Consignment contracts can be complicated, as are the types of transactions in the aviation industry. Vista-Suite Enterprise supports different commission percentages for four different situations in a transaction. You can specify the commission percentage for a standard outright transaction, a percentage for an outright transaction you have had repaired, an exchange transaction, and an exchange transaction that has been repaired. These options give you more power over your consignment contracts.

User Interface and Data Entry

Vista-Suite Enterprise data entry in the inventory Pools feature allows users to turn up to six automated prompts on or off. Understanding that each Pool may require different data, these prompts are controlled at the Pool level. They are user-specific because different data entry clerks may enter different data in the same Pool.

Inventory Pools, or Lots, often require extensive data entry. To improve the data entry experience, hotkeys or shortcut keys have been incorporated. Ctrl+Enter, for example, saves an inventory item entry while Ctrl+A adds a new entry. With many other hotkeys, data entry is a breeze.

Like all other transaction browses in Vista-Suite Enterprise, you can see the inventory records within the Pool right from the master browse. These shortcuts can save you time and effort when searching for data.

Twelve different browses within an Inventory Pool give you visibility of all aspects of a Pool's progress, state of inventory, audit logs, or transactional history. These grids can be searched, sorted, and exported for easy viewing in MS Excel. No more hunting around to find the activity central to the Pool; it's now neatly displayed right in front of you.

Digital File and Data Management

A great feature throughout Vista-Suite Enterprise is the consolidated views of file attachments. Now, you can have that inside your inventory Pools as well. We take all files attached to the part master records or inventory records within the Pool and show them in a consolidated library for fast and easy research. Of course, the files are also attached and available for individual records. This powerful feature is hugely popular amongst our users.

Paperwork is essential and a part of life in aviation. Recognizing that, Vista-Suite Enterprise Inventory Pools allows you to attach standard paperwork, images, or other files directly to the Pool and have it default to each inventory record added to the Pool. This handy feature can save you a ton of time while entering the inventory.

Reports and Analytics

With Vista-Suite Enterprise Inventory Pools, you can print forms or reports from the Pool. Treating the Pool as a transaction of sorts allows you to do mass label printing, or create reports unique to that Pool. To learn more about Vista-Suite Enterprise's powerful Forms and Reports builder, talk to your local Sales Representative right away!

We understand that all companies use Pools, or Lots, in unique ways and, therefore, have different requirements for analyzing the performance of those packages. With Vista-Suite Enterprise and the built-in Dashboard designer, you can build custom dashboards to analyze Pool performance over time.

Pools are dynamic. Pool Margins and consignment characters can change, among other things. With the integrated audit logs for Pools, you have a chronological history of all changes to the Pool's characteristics. This is helpful during audits, when correcting mistakes, and when conducting other research.

Comprehensive Inventory Pool Overview for Aviation Components

This page provides a detailed listing of Pools, complete with 31 searchable columns of information such as, entry date, description, owner, workflow status, and financials.

Viewing the Contents of a Pool

The expanded view reveals inventory associated with a pool for tracking specific items easily.

Pool Commission Overview

The commission view provides an organized, filterable, and searchable list of inventory pools, and includes additional details such as calculation method, commission type, commission amounts, overrides, and associations with other transaction types.

Create and Manage Inventory Pools

Pool information is clearly positioned for adding or editing details of inventory pools and associated parts, complete with additional navigation tabs for file management, linked order viewing, internal pinned notes and more.

Additional Pool Details

Other tabs, like the details tab, contain more fields and options to retain information about the pool.

Software development moves fast, and features evolve over time. While we strive to keep this and other pages accurate, some information may not reflect the most recent changes. For the most current details, we recommend scheduling a live demo at ambryhill.com/demo.

Back to Core Features List

Inventory Pools

Manage Inventory Pools, Consignment Transactions, and Custom Costing with Innovative and Efficient Pool Management Capabilities

Pool (Lots) Management

Supports Traditional Pools (Lots) as well as Generic Pools

Mix and Match Regular Stock, Consigned Stock, and Pool Stock On The Line Items

Signaling System To Identify Pool Types Quickly

Status Pools To Track Progression

Assign Sales People and Agents To Pools

Tracks Transferred Items In or Out

Purchased Items Can Be Assigned To Pools

Manage Cost Distributions By Percent of Sale

Supports Labor Recording Against The Pool

Auto Calculate RO Piece Parts Cost

Alerts When Applying Piece Parts On Repairs

Apply Repair Costs To Inventory or Pools

Apply Charges To Pools

Support Manual Cost Adjustments

Historical Transaction Tracking

Supports User Defined Fields On Pool Header

Consignments

Consignment Options

On-Demand Cost & Commission Calculation Overrides On Transactions

Create Purchase Orders For Commissions Owed

Master Commission Browses for Easy Export Of Data

Multiple Consignment Commission Percentage for Different Transaction Scenarios

User Interface and Data Entry

Rapid Data Entry Features

Hotkey Support

Embedded Sub Browses To Show Pool Contents

Summary Grids For Broad Visibility Of Activity

Digital File and Data Management

Consolidated Views Of All Files Attached To Inventory

Attach Files To The Pool And Automatically Apply To The Pool Items

Reports and Analytics

Supports Forms and Reports

Embedded Dashboards Allows For Pools Analysis

Audit Logs

Comprehensive Inventory Pool Overview for Aviation Components

Viewing the Contents of a Pool

Pool Commission Overview

Create and Manage Inventory Pools

Additional Pool Details

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