Clarify inventory types

[jmcameron]

Some of our concepts for inventory articles needed to be reexamined -- particularly now that we support assets. Consider the following types of inventory items:

Types of inventory	is_asset	consumable	sold to patient	physical item	expiration date	Notes
Asset	Yes	No	No	Yes	Approximate expected end of life
Medications	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Hard expiration date
Services	No	No	Yes	No	N/A	eg. surgeries, etc

Assets - are single specific physical instances of inventory. Assets are usually considered durable (although sometimes with an expected lifetime). Assets will not be sold to patients. Assets are available to be transferred between depots, shipped, or assigned to individuals or services.

Consumables - are lots (physical items) that are generally used by services or dispensed to patients. But what does "consumable" really mean? We have thought of "consumable" as something that is used up (eg, medications, one-use articles, etc). But how does this apply to articles (such as office supplies) used by services?

Services - are actions (such as surgeries) that are performed by Services usually for a specific patient. These are not physical items although performing the service may require expenditure of consumables.

Questions

• At some point, it may make sense to sell an asset outside of the facility it belongs to. This would be a stock exit of sorts. How should this be handled? Are any modifications of the Stock Exit page necessary to support this? How does this differ from selling it to a patient?

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Categories of Inventory As a long-term goal, we would like the ability to identify categories of inventory that have specific behavior in terms of the current is_asset / consumable / sellable flags. For instance an "Office Material" category would enforce is_asset=No, consumable=Yes, and sellable=No. Then we could simplify the logic of handling these flags for many internal operations (instead of chained/nested logic with the flags). Perhaps the categories could be hierarchical so that a category would enforce a certain behavior and all categories derived from it would inherit the same behavior.

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Related Information - Inventory Type

• It does not appear that any production sites are using inventory_type to any degree. When we extended lots to support assets, we decided to reuse the 'inventory_type' to support the 'equipment_type' data that some users of Assets might need. That decision may require us to refactor the current use of 'inventory_type' data.
• Currently the default definitions for 'inventory_type' are:
  • Article
  • Assembly
  • Service
  • FYI: One of the production sites has added "Honoraire medeccin' and 'SOJA'