Inventory visibility

I am looking for alternatives to creating a new branch plant. We have field engineers stationed near remote branch plants and they carry some inventory to support local customers. Is there a way have visibilty to the engineer's inventory without creating a new branch plant or assigning a location within the branch plant close to them?

Pat,

I'd need some more clarification of what you do and don't want to consider. It sounds to me like you don't want to create a branch plant or a location to track the inventory. Without these pieces, there is no inventory management within JDE, as far as I know. I'd think that the simplest way to have visibility to this remote inventory is to create a location in your existing branch plant, and assign the inventory to that location. You can assign the location a status so that MRP won't net that location's inventory, if you wish. Probably the hardest part will be keeping the inventory level maintained in that inventory's location records. Good luck!

If you don't want to create a location or a branch/plant your options are
limited to yellow sticky notes. (Although I'm told that blue also works.)



Andy Klee

Thanks for the quick reply, Don. The options you suggest are the ones we thought would work as well, but we have two conflicts of interest. 1) The remote branch plant is a third party warehouse and I am told that contractually we cannot assign a location to them that is physically outside of their control. 2) The number of field engineers will increase as part of a new service strategy, and so will the number of branch plants, so this could turn into a maintenance nightmare. I was just wondering if anyone had ever been in a similar situation.

Hi there... I had one client that did something similar to what Don was
talking about except they set up 1 branch/plant that was a "consignment"
type of branch/plant... then each place (or store in their case) was a
location within that branch/plant... therefore you can exclude that
Branch/PLant from reporting, but allow transactions to happen within that
branch/plant and locations for those field engineers...would that work?
thanks, Bobby

Since you've essentially ruled out the two ways of tracking on-hand quantities (B/P and Location), you could consider creating a commitment against the remote branch plant using a different sales order type. Create the commitment against one of the other "buckets" - On Sales Order Other (OT1P or OT2P). For visibility, the "customer" would be the field engineer. Not very elegant, and would require concientious maintenance of the orders as the inventory was used, but it would give you some visibility of the quantities without using B/P or locations.

Thanks for the feedback, Tim. This is very helpful.



One World XE, B7.333, Service Pack 20.

Do they take inventory from the remote facility? and then sell it to end customers? (enter a special SO using the engineers name to reduce/commit the inventory in the remote facility as if it was an SB, then use blanket order procesing to create a regular order from it to manage the sales to the customer.)
Didn't try this, but it sounds good?!