Material Inventory

Manage your Material Inventory

Brenda Beckham avatar
Written by Brenda Beckham
Updated over a week ago

Material Inventory

Managing your material inventory is an important step in understanding the total cost of your products as material cost feed directly into the production of your products. The Material Inventory view within Uphance allows you the opportunity to manage your Raw Materials.  

On the Material Inventory screen, you will be able to see sizes, colors, what is in stock, what is ordered (confirmed customer sales orders), what is in production (at your manufacturer) and what is available (current inventory).

To access this view, select Material Inventory from your left, main vertical menu. From there, you can filter for your season, category, supplier or search for a specific product.

Figure 1

When a Material pick ticket is created/shipped, materials will be reduced from stock and added to the WIP (Work-In-Process) column as shown in Figure 1.

When Production Delivery is received (checked-in), products will be added to the product inventory and reduced in the corresponding materials' WIP inventory, if a material pick ticket has been created. 

If a material pick ticket has not been created, a withdraw occurs on the material inventory from the In stock when Production order Delivery has been checked-in. The Material In Stock will not be reduced if the Production order is created and confirmed from the Production Batch.

Warehouse

As shown on the Material Inventory screen in Figure 1, Uphance also allows you to filter on a Warehouse.  If you have Multi-warehouse enabled, you can also create Material-specific Warehouses separate of your Primary (Product) Warehouses enabling you to filter/focus only on those inventories.  

Figure 2

To create a Material Warehouse, 

  1. Navigate to Settings>Warehouses

  2. Select the plus sign (+) in the top right corner to add a Warehouse

  3. Type the Name of the Warehouse

  4. Click the box next to "Material warehouse"

  5. Click the Save button

Figure 3

When you drill into any of our Materials, the Inventory tab allows you to take a closer look and filter on specific Warehouses as well.  See Figure 4 filtered on Material Warehouse for a Silk Material.

Figure 4

Download/Export

Use the "download" button at the bottom left of the screen to download your material (CSV or Excel formats), make edits and upload back into Uphance.  

  • Stock represents Raw Materials that have been ordered and "received".

  • Ordered represents what has been ordered from your supplier but has not yet been received.

  • In Production are the raw materials that are with your manufacturer to build product required to fill your sales orders.

  • Available is similar to In Stock except it does not include those raw materials that are already "reserved" for production orders.  

Import/Upload 

If you already have your data in another spreadsheet or database, you can import that data into Uphance without having to manually create your raw materials one-by-one.

From the listing of all of your Material Inventory page, click on the "upload" button at top-right to open the Import dialog:

You'll notice a link to download a materials spreadsheet template. The spreadsheet template illustrates the exact structure required for your upload spreadsheet.  

  1. Download the template

  2. Add your data to the template using the same structure and column headings provided in the template spreadsheet. (Don't change the column heading names).

  3. Once your data has been added, save your file to your usual location.

  4. Use The "Browse" button to locate your file (where you saved it).

  5. Click the "Upload" button.

Uphance will transform your existing spreadsheets into the same format with the same column headers before attempting to upload into Uphance.

Import History

Once your Raw Materials have been imported, you will be presented with the Import History screen that shows you whether the import was successful.  

Import Alerts & Notifications

You will also receive an email confirmation from [email protected]:

In addition, you will get a notification at the top, right of the screen letting you know whether they passed or failed.  Click on the "bell" to see these notifications:

Raw Materials spreadsheet import fields

Listed below are the Raw Materials spreadsheet import fields and their description.  Also noted is whether these are "required" fields or not.  If not a required field, feel free to leave them blank.  If they are a required field, the data in that field cannot be left blank or the upload will fail.

name
 Short raw material name.

category
 The raw material category name. If the category doesn't yet exist, a new category will be created. Required field.

supplier_ref
 The supplier reference information (e.g. their part number).

unit_price
 The price for a single unit.

color
 Color that distinguishes this raw material variation. You will have one row for each variation in your spreadsheet with different values in this column. 

size
 Enter the size of the raw material. 

company_name
 The name of the company.

company_currency
 The currency this supplier uses.

description
 The longer product description.

sizes
 The sizes this raw material is available in.

width
 The width of the raw material.

image_url
 The link to an online image.  

textile_content The textile content value for the product variation.

tariff_code
 US harmonized tariff code for the product variation.

mid_code
The manufacturer identification code for the product variation. For more info, see Requirements for MID:   https://help.cbp.gov/app/answers/detail/a_id/952/~/requirements-for-mid%E2%80%99s

country_of_origin Two letter ISO code (e.g. GB, US, CN) that corresponds to the product variation's country of manufacturing origin.  NOTE:  Please use the country codes defined at https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/country_code_list.htminstead of spelling out the country.

intrastat_code EU member state intrastat code for the product variation.

hex_color
 The hexi code color.

duty_rate
 Enter the fees for duty.

freight
 Enter any fees for shipping or freight.

other_costs
 Enter any other cost associated with the supply of this raw material.

minimal_quantity
 Enter any quantities that are minimally required.

Other Knowledge Articles

See other Knowledge Articles to learn more how your Raw Material Inventory is impacted. 

  • See our Materials Knowledge Article to learn how to add Raw Materials and associated attributes (swatch, color, suppliers, pricing, etc.) to your Materials Database.  

  • See our Material requirements Knowledge Article to for information on managing Raw Materials that are required to cover customer sales orders or production (for manufacturing) orders.

  • See our Material Purchase Orders Knowledge Article to create orders for your suppliers to obtain raw materials.

  • See our Manage Material Name Changes to learn what to do if you have a material name change.

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