Stock Rules in ServiceNow
With Laurence Tindall
In this article, we will show you a powerful feature in the Hardware Asset Management application in ServiceNow called stock rules. Stock rules allow you to automatically replenish the stock of assets in your stock rooms when they drop below a defined quantity. This feature is fantastic for ensuring you and your team always have enough assets in stock and aren't caught off guard when fulfilling asset requests. The stock rules feature can automatically replenish stock from another stockroom via a transfer order or create a purchase order for the procurement of additional assets from your vendor of choice.
Creating a Stock Rule
In this example, we will show you how to set up a stock rule for the replenishment of 15-inch MacBook Pros. Before we get started, you need the procurement plugin installed in your ServiceNow instance. If you would like the stock rules module to generate purchase orders, the first thing you'll want to do is type in stock rules in the application navigator, and click on the stock rules module located under the inventory application. The stock rules list view will now load; click on the new button, and the stock rule form will now load.
Defining a Stock Rule
In the Model field, this field allows you to select the model to which this stock rule applies. In this example, we're going to select the Apple MacBook Pro 15-inch.
Next, we have the Stockroom field, this field enables you to select the Stockroom in which this rule applies to. For this example, we’ve created five MacBook Pros and put them in the Southern California Stockroom. In the next field, we have Threshold; this field allows you to define when the restocking gets triggered. In this example, we are going to select five — this means as soon as you change one of the five MacBook Pro 15-inches to in use from the Southern California Stockroom, this stock rule will be triggered.
Next, we have the Restocking option field. From here you can either select stockroom or vendor. Selecting stockroom will initiate the transfer order when the stock rule is run, and selecting vendor will generate a purchase order for the replenishment of stock. When you select stockroom, a new field called parent stockroom displays. This field allows you to choose the stockroom, from which additional assets should automatically be transferred from. In this example, we've placed 20 MacBook Pro 15-inches in the San Diego South warehouse. The final field is Order size; this field allows you to define how many assets should either be transferred or purchased depending on your restocking option. We will enter 10, as this is the sufficient amount for the number of requests we receive. Now that we've completed defining the stock rule, click the submit button to finish creating it.
Stock Rule in Action
Now, let's see the stock rule in action. For our example, we are going to set one of the MacBook Pro 15-inches located in the Southern California warehouse stockroom to in-use. This will drop the in-stock quantity to four. Since the stock rule feature is only run once a day via a scheduled job, we're going to have to go into the scheduled jobs module and manually trigger the scheduled job. To do this, we are going to open the stock rule runner schedule item, set the next action date to yesterday's date, and hit update. This will manually trigger the scheduled item. Now if we head over to the transfer orders module, we can see that a transfer order has automatically been created from the stock rule, and the assets will soon be replenished.
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