[RFG 2023] Add low inventory report to dashboard

[cielf]

Summary

Add a low inventory report to the dashboard

Why

Allow banks to see at a glance which items they need to get more of or risk not being able to fulfill requests

Details

There will be a new card on the dashboard, titled "Bank-wide Low inventory". It should be after the announcements.

It will show the items that are at or below the greater of minimum and recommended quantity at each storage location across the bank (some banks have given minimum but not recommended quantities)

It will have the following columns

• storage location
• item name
• quantity
• minimum quantity
• recommended quantity

If there are no items that are low, the card can just say "Inventory is at recommended levels (minimum and recommended levels can be set on each item)"

Initial sort: I suggest alpha by item within storage location.

Hopefully there won't be so many that the sort will really be an issue!

Other things you should know

We are grouping a number of dashboard-related changes together and will merge these individual changes into a long lived dashboard-related branch. We will merge this long lived branch into main when we are ready to release the whole suite.

Criteria for completion

• Report available on dashboard
• automated tests

Bonus round

• add in a column (before item name) with a visual indicator (like a red "!"? ) if the quantity is below the minimum quantity.

[cielf]

I realized overnight that, as written, this will not be useful for Sylvia's Sisters. We would need to add a "include in low inventory report" flag on the storage location (and they'll need to add the recommended levels, of course).

[ChaelCodes]

Right now, it looks like we're configuring "minimum quantity" at the item level, which means that we're assuming all banks should have the same distribution and quantities at every location.

We know this doesn't work for Sylvia's Sisters, but I think it's also an issue for organizations with banks that support different communities. Each community would have a population that needs different items.

I want to propose a change. Could we add a minimum_quantity and recommended_quantity to InventoryItem? We could then use this value to allow banks to set location-specific quantity guidelines.

Sylvia's Sisters could set the minimum_quantity for all their residential locations to 0, but they could also distribute more disposable products to Virginia, and more reusable products to Uganda.

I have an idea for what the roll-out for this could look like, and how to transition minimum_quantity on item to a global value for an item, instead of a per-bank quantity.

[cielf]

(I missed the first part of SS's stuff, didn't know they were doing Uganda)

[cielf]

What I think I saw with the SS model is they wouldn't ever be concerned about their residential "storage locations" having low inventory. Ever. Because they aren't really storage locations, they are workstations with materials.

[cielf]

I understand what you're saying about banks with different communities -- we have other banks that essentially have different branches, and those branches are being represented as storage locations.

[cielf]

(Thinking 'aloud' -- apologize in advance for the blathery nature of this) I'm not (yet?) sure that InventoryItem is the right place for this -- I mean, logically it is -- but an InventoryItem only comes into being when Inventory is added to the storage location (until a very short time ago it also disappeared when it was taken down to 0) So there's some flow issues there. I'm a bit concerned about the extra input work, too, for those banks with a lot of storage locations. We'd need to add a whole slice for InventoryItems, right? Though for those banks that have already put recommended levels in, we could do a reasonably smooth default migration.

[cielf]

I'm a bit confused by this part of your comment: "and how to transition minimum_quantity on item to a global value for an item, instead of a per-bank quantity." -- minimum_quantity is never going to be at higher than a bank level. Was that a mis-speak, or am I just not getting it?

[cielf]

Would be happy to pop onto a Zoom to discuss in the am. Would love to hear your ideas for a relatively painless transition .

[cielf]

(Hmmm... what is the reason we don't add InventoryItems until inventory is added to the storage location? Was there a business reason or was it an accident)

[ChaelCodes]

Transition idea -

• New Columns are added to InventoryItem
  • New columns default to 0
• If an item has a minimum quantity, and a storage location has a warehouse type of 'Consumer, self-storage or container space', 'Commercial/office/business space that contains storage space', or 'Warehouse with loading bay', we should populate minimum_quantity on the InventoryItem.
  • This can be a rake task that accepts an organization as a parameter, so if we want to update an indivdual bank in the future, we can.
• Start displaying/editing this minimum_quantity in reports, forms, and dashboards
• Start removing the item level minimum_quantity from reports and dashboards
• Reintroduce the item level minimum_quantity as a bank-level global quantity to check against

It'll be slow, but that'll give people time to adapt and change.

[ChaelCodes]

(Thinking 'aloud' -- apologize in advance for the blathery nature of this) I'm not (yet?) sure that InventoryItem is the right place for this -- I mean, logically it is -- but an InventoryItem only comes into being when Inventory is added to the storage location (until a very short time ago it also disappeared when it was taken down to 0) So there's some flow issues there. I'm a bit concerned about the extra input work, too, for those banks with a lot of storage locations. We'd need to add a whole slice for InventoryItems, right? Though for those banks that have already put recommended levels in, we could do a reasonably smooth default migration.

(Hmmm... what is the reason we don't add InventoryItems until inventory is added to the storage location? Was there a business reason or was it an accident)

I'm okay with it living somewhere other than InventoryItem. I'm looking for a relationship between Item and StorageLocation, and I think this is a good place for it, but if we want to introduce a separate join table, I'm open to that.

I'm a bit confused by this part of your comment: "and how to transition minimum_quantity on item to a global value for an item, instead of a per-bank per-location quantity." -- minimum_quantity is never going to be at higher than a bank level. Was that a mis-speak, or am I just not getting it?

You're right. I was thinking of locations as bank branches and misspoke.

[cielf]

I do think we might want to introduce a separate table -- but only because I'm not positive if there are business reasons for the current InventoryItem behaviour.

[cielf]

So, we're thinking in terms of initially doing the report using the levels on Item (pretty sure S'sS doesn't use the recommended levels yet) , then?

[cielf]

I'm thinking maybe we hide the report unless they have entered any recommended levels or non-zero minumums.

[cielf]

Re transition: I think we'd want to do some research on the patterns over all the banks -- Sylvia's Sisters might be a special case in how they are using the residential.

[cielf]

And I think we should populate both minimum and recommended from the Item levels (I expect you meant that, but being explicit)

[cielf]

Hey @ChaelCodes -- just checking if there's anything blocking the initial version of this [I have been assuming we're doing an initial version that uses the item-level minimum and recommended values, then we work on making it better.] ?

[ChaelCodes]

Hey @ChaelCodes -- just checking if there's anything blocking the initial version of this [I have been assuming we're doing an initial version that uses the item-level minimum and recommended values, then we work on making it better.] ?

Nope! Nothing blocking it. Just haven't had a chance to pick it up since the RFG event. I worked on removing Donation (All Sources), and the Experimental Docker one still needs the Org spec fixed.

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[github-actions]

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[ChaelCodes]

That initial PR to add the low inventory report is ready for review: #3857

[cielf]

Formally assigning @awwaiid because I know Brock's doing a last push to get all the dashboard items in place.

[awwaiid]

This is merged into dashboard and I manually validated it in addition to the specs. Further changes can be in separate issues and part of the unified dashboard validation.