A question for you:
Who is performing the inventory counts on the trucks - is it the technician or someone else?
If it's the technician, you could potentially run into an issue of pencil-whipping and undervaluing your inventory as they may not actually count everything as they should. It could result in a situation where your technician says they counted 10 of an item, but in reality only had 5 of them. They go to their next jobs and "use" a few to make up for their false number and even out the inventory, therefore giving inaccurate job costing. Ideally, you'd want someone from your warehouse, or another employee separate from the technician, to count the inventory to ensure accuracy and no conflicts of interest.
Technicians should never really run out of items. If they are, this usually means that replenishments are occurring as often as they should, the items are not being added properly to jobs to update the on hand quantity at the truck, or that your templates need to be adjusted to ensure that the min/max for the items better reflects actual usage.
In the event that your tech is simply using more that others, you can create a new template for the at tech or have a PO created to purchase additional items.
Regular audits, at least once a quarter, would help to alleviate this issue.
Furthermore, your office staff should already know about inventory discrepancies because ST allows for negative balances automatically for the technicians. If they have more than their physical inventory shows, a negative balance will result and prevent the job from being closed out. This forces the office staff to create the adjustment and figure out why the inventory on hand count is incorrect.
I would think a technician would notify the office for a PO, or create one themselves, if they determined that were going to need more or if they were out, regardless of if they had a physical count on the mobile app or not.
