Avail. check in multi-comp. environment: how do you do this?

MartinFK

Hi all,

this is not a "cry for help" topic - more a (hopefully) discussion about different approaches to solve a missing feature in NAV (4.03 in our case).

Brief situation:
- Distribution company with 8+ local legal entities within Europe
- Each sales company is represented by a NAV company
- One supply chain company (purchase, warehouse, logistics), represented by a NAV company.
- Stock only exists in the supply chain company
- Products are very technical and sold as Bill-of-Materials. BOMs are only used as sales-boms and are not "produced" in advance.
- Due to the high cost price of our items we try to have stock at a minimum level
- Reorder time for some items are 4weeks +

Orders are generated in the sales company and then transferred (intercompany functionality) to the supply chain company.
There orders are processed (pick & pack, shipment) and transferred back to the sales companies, where invoices to the customers are created.

Status:
We introduced a availibility check for the sales companies before they transfer the order to the supply chain company.
Additionally we created a "light" capable to promise functionality for them.

Challenge:
The above setup is working but is weak when there are unplanned changes. If items are damaged in the warehouse by accident, orders will turn not-shippable.
The complete order-net can be affected.
Due to the seperation of sales company and supply chain company we struggle to give the information on order-delays. Which leads to delayed shipments.

Question:
What are (were) your approaches for customers with a comparable setup
Navision is not holding much in the standard - so there have to be individual solutions out there.


Looking forward to your comments,

Martin

Faithie_Robertson

Martin,

Are you using the inter-company granule with NAV? It handles these transactions. The sales company has a vendor, which represents the distribution company. The distribution company has a customer to represent the sales company. Documents are created from purchases by the sales company into the distribution company, and invoices back to the sales company.

This may be something you'd want to look into if you're not using it - or you may decide it's overkill. Just a thought.

If you don't want to use that solution, you might consider creating some sort of EDI-ish file that would be transferred from the distribution company to the sales company to update the date promised. You would communiate to them the order, the item, the new stock level, and perhaps even the date that the order quantity could be delivered. This file could be used in the sales company to update the orders for the item, and create a customer-facing order update document.

That's just a couple of solutions. I'm sure there are many more.

MartinFK

Hi,

we are using the intercompany feature to move the orders between the companies and do the ic-posting.

Our challenge is to provide an avialibility check across the companies.
All sales organizations are consuming items from one company, so we check the availibility at the moment of the transfer to the supply chain company.

But if availibility changes in the supply chain company, we struggle to find out and inform the companies that are affected.

My question is: how are other Navision customers solve this availibilty-across-company issue.

Steve.Desmedt

Hello,

Do you already have a solution for this ?
Which version are you running ?
Have you ever thought about doing this check with webservices between those companies ?

Kind regards

MartinFK

Hi Steve,

yes and no :-)
We are running with database 4.03 and do currently upgrade to 6.0R2 technically.

No we haven't thought about that. We use currently SQL-queries (because of performance) to do the availibility check.

1. Sales organisation creates order
2. Sales organisation checks availibility in warehouse organisation
3. If availibility given, transfer the order to warehouse organisation (via Intercompany module)
(items on stock are not reserverd or allocated to sales orders)

Our challenge is to handle exceptions after the transfer to the warehouse organisation.
- delay of purchase deliveries
- damage on shopfloor (reduces stock level)

And to check on changes (e.g. if a customer request a different shipment date) if other orders are not affected negatively by doing that.