Simple Stock Management

This extension adds to iTop the capability to manage stock of various elements.

Stock Management extension introduces the capability to manage stock through a new “Stock” class. Such stock element can be of different type: stock of RJ45, stock of cables, stock of video cards… defined through a simple typology class “Stock Type”.

A Stock follows a life cycle: once created, it can be supplied (ie available quantity can be increased) and quantity can be consumed. Stock increase is done through a life cycle action. Where consumption is done when a Ticket is linked to the Stock with a quantity specified on the link between the stock and the Ticket. Multiple Tickets can be attached to a Stock.

If the Stock falls below the user defined Warning level, a background task running every minute, moves the stock to Empty state and a notification may be sent, if configured.

When listing the stocks, the empty ones are highlighted:

The stock moves back to the Restocked state if enough quantity is added to the stock.

Attachment of ticket to a Stock can only be done from the details screen of a Stock, not from the details of the Ticket. Consumption of stock elements is done when attaching Ticket to it.

Status being computed in background, it can be misleading in some cases:

• When a Ticket consumed enough items to set the Stock quantity below the threshold, the status isn't refreshed immediately.
• When you add to an empty Stock, any quantity, it assumes it is “supplied” again, which is the most common situation, but when you add a negative number, the resulting status looks confusing, as it says “Restocked” during 60 seconds, until the cron.php does its job.

The extension requires iTop 2.5.0, at least, as well as the extensions itop-config-mgmt 2.5.0 and itop-tickets 2.5.0.

Use the Standard installation process for this extension.

No specific configuration parameter is required for the extension.

Make sure this one is scheduled to run on your system. To check the status of this service, use the command:

php webservice/cron.php --auth_user=user --auth_pwd=password --status_only=1

The “Stocks” menu available under the Configuration management section allows you to list, filter and search the stock element objects that have been created in iTop.

A stock element has the following attributes…

Quantity in stock is the difference between the sum of all quantities that have been added to the stock element and the sum of all quantities consumed by the linked user requests. Computation of remaining quantity is asynchronous: it is done regularly by the cron and can be manually launched through a specific action.

Those fields are not displayed by default. Quantity to add to the stock is required during “Add to stock” action.

… and links (next to the history tab):

This is the life cycle followed by a Stock element:

From a list or the detail screen of Stock, clicking on the “New” button displays the following form:

Once created, the Configuration Manager can supply the Stock through the “Add to stock” button available in the “other actions” menu. The figure entered at this stage indicates the quantity added to the stock for that element. It can be negative, to . Once done the whole detail screen is displayed:

The “Add to stock” action can be done any time from that state or from the empty state. The “Cumulated quantity” attribute stores the global quantity of objects that have been added to the current stock element. This figure never decreases.

Current quantity decreases when tickets are attached to the stock by a Support Agent or a Change Implementor with a consumed quantity.

Situation where the status is temporarly inaccurate: It can be fixed manually with the menu “Check stock status”, or just wait 60 seconds for the cron.php to do the job

Computation of stock status is done in an asynchronous way. As a result, it can be temporarily wrong (less than 60 seconds):

• when the cron is running, it recomputes the status to its correct value:

• or when the user press the Check stocks status menu available in the Other Actions menu:

In order to move the current quantity above the threshold, the stock needs to be supplied again. It could also come back by “chance”, if the quantity consumed by the tickets is decreased.

New type of stock can be created on the fly while editing a stock, with the + button. The Configuration Manager can see all Stock types at once in the dashboard displayed by the menu Data administration / Typology configuration

The extension doesn't automatically create any notification. Should you wish to notify the stock owner or any other contact that the quantity in stock has fallen below the threshold, ask your iTop administrator to create the notification first.

For that purpose, a trigger on entering a state must be created, like:

The associated trigger action is standard. Only point to keep in mind: the owner of the stock element is defined by the attribute owner_id. Destination of the mail can be, therefore, defined like this:

SELECT Person WHERE id= :this->owner_id