How do I manage my trunk stock inventory in Beacon? 

Trunk Stock Background (Skip if you already know)

"Trunk stock" in our context is the inventory that your medical device manufacturer has consigned to you for the purposes of selling into healthcare facilities and covering their use in surgical cases. 

This "trunk inventory" is kind of a blanket term, and the actual trunk stock is not always physically in the trunk of your car. It may refer to inventory stored in your garage, at a customer, or even loaned to a fellow sales rep from your distributorship. Well, how are you supposed to manage all of that inventory? 

Often, when using a warehouse management software or inventory management tool, it is focused on managing inventory at the Manufacturer level. But, what about sales rep and distributor inventory? Sales reps and distributors have to manage the inventory in their trunkstock as well!

Luckily, managing trunk inventory as a sales rep or distributor in Beacon is a breeze using custom inventory locations, containers, inventory tags, and inventory statuses. 

The first step to managing the inventory in your trunk stock is to get an understanding of how you'll organize your inventory. Where do you store it?

The inventory transferred to you is already in your custody in Beacon, it is now up to you if you'll manage the inventory stored at different locations. Maybe you store trunk inventory in your car trunk, garage, office, warehouse, or even at certain facilities. 

There are a few strategies you can employ, but you'll have to see what works best for you. 

Custom Locations

Custom locations are the perfect tool for managing your warehouse inventory, without the need for an ERP or heavy duty warehouse inventory management system. 

Create a custom location for anywhere you want to manage inventory, totally up to you! 

This will allow you to group and manage inventory in various warehouses, buckets, or geographic locations all within your custody. 

Containers

Containers are typically used to hold other devices that are transported together, like a surgical tray. However, they can be a useful way of grouping items within your existing inventory. 

For instance, you could create a container for your car trunk stock, a different container for inventory in your garage, etc. 

Then, when you're in a surgical case you could filter on the container to pull up the specific trunk inventory that is in that container. 

Preference Cards

Preference cards allow a user to store information about certain inventory that is used when a given Physician performs a procedure. These preference cards can be used to order exactly what the surgeon requires, assuming the procedure is common and reproduced over time. These preference cards can help cut down on the administrative burden of requesting inventory, so you can request exactly what is needed with consistency and so nothing is forgotten. This can potentially help to reduce trunk stock and excess inventory build by shipping items that are not needed. 

Quick Transfers

Often, users are interested in shrinking their trunk stock to alleviate excess inventory burden and to offload the financial risk of carrying so much inventory, or from the manufacturer perspective, so reduce the overhead of inventory out in the field sitting stagnant. 

If that's the case, you can use Quick Transfers to allow users to transfer themselves inventory from a Quick Transfer custodian when they need it. This functions like a forward stocking location, so there would generally need to be some sort of regional inventory supply that the users could obtain their stock from. The advantage of this method is to allow users to obtain inventory quickly, instead of having to wait for lengthy shipments before a scheduled case, reduce the administrative burden on the manufacturer back office, and to reduce the quantity sitting in individual distributor trunk stock inventory.