Shipment of non-stocked items (or is it Production?)

[Reinier]

Hello,

First of all, my compliments and respect for red1 and all te contributors on this forum. Many of the postings and tutorials really helped me to get more out of Compiere. I hope my knowledge of compiere and implementing large ERP-systems like SAP will be enough to also contribute to forums topics.

However, my knowledge is of compiere is not enough to understand the folllowing:

I've created a SO (delivery-rule = complete line) with two lines:
- line 1, Stocked item (productdefinition: stock=y, purchase=y, sale=y), no inventory available.
- line 2, Non-stocked item (productdefinition: stock=n, purchase=y, sale=y)

Much to my surprise, when I create the shipment (process 'create shipment') is will create a shipment for line 2.
No shipment for line 1, but that is expected since no inventory is availabe.

I would only expect to get a shipment for line 1 after the creation of a purchase-order and confirm the delivery for that PO.

Did I miss something in the logic of Compiere?

Thanks in advance,

Reinier

[red1]

hi,
i havent played with this part torohly before so i m not sure what u mean by surprise.

Cant think of anything except u can check your settings in other rules such as Delivery and Invoicing Rules.

[Reinier]

Hello Red1,

Thanks for your quick response.

what I mean with surpise is the following:
One creates a shipment when goods are there to deliver to the customer. Right?

Line2 on the Salesorder (btw, a standard order, billrule=immidiate, delivery-rule=complete line) is an item that's for which no inventory is held. Every time a customer orders it, it needs to be purchased from the supplier. So, how can Compiere create a shipment when this item is not eve purchased yet from the supplier. That's why I'am surprised.

I've checked all my settings and they seem to be allright. I'am wondering though about the inventory-level of products that are marked as 'stock=N' as is my product on orderline2. On product-info, it defaults to 99.999, (grey-ed out). I certainly hope that the shipment-process does not consider this default value 99.999 as the actual stock-level. It would explain its behaviour, but to me that should be a bug.

Regards,

Reinier

[lofx]

Hi!!!

Actually, it is doing exactly that. As the product is marked as not stocked, the system assumes something like "you do not need to control the availability, or ask for it to be purchased from a vendor, so i will deliver it straightaway and i won't bother no more".

At least, and not going into the codes, that is what i assume form your (let me say, very well expressed) post.

You have to ask yourself if that product is not really stocked, i mean, if it needs to be at your location, even if only to be loaded and sent to a customer, this is stocked for compiere as your tracking its availability if only at that brief and precise moment. Which means you would have to mark it as stocked and control its movements.
If the product is not stocked, in the sense that is sent directly from your vendor to your customer, use is drop ship fields.

Hope this helps,

Regards,

[Reinier]

Hello,

Thanks for the explanation. I understand your reasoning and it certainly matches the real-life situation i'm facing. Technically, the ordered products go on stock for a very brief period of time and for one, and only one customer. Actually, it are window-curtains. We order the fabric first and then it gets tailored to the requirements of the customer.

Since the last post i've already played about by marking te product as a stocked item and investigating the use of de 'drop shipment' on the SO-header.

We'll see were it ends

Thanks again for your help guys.

Reinier

[ReddoC]

Ok i have a similar case. I tried to use the drop shipment on the SO-Header.

and the result was that no shipment was generated and products don't move from my warehouse.

But how to send to the vendor the information to ship all the product in my SO ?

[Reinier]

Hello ReddoC,

Sorry to hear that this particular 'feature' is troubleling you too.

As it stands, i've changed the non-stocked item to stocked as suggested by lofx and of course, that works allright. Unfortunately, there's a kickback. When my SO comprises of items with replenishmentmethods Minimum stock and items with replenishmentmethods of 'manual', both will be created when creating PO from SO. This means that every PO needs to be modified, eg throwing away the items that really should be ordered from replishment-report. Can't have it all i guess but i'm starting to wonder in what cases the process 'create PO from SO' is really helpful. But, i'll certainly ask this question during the Bonn-training.

Regards,

Reinier

[red1]

Reinier,
U can use the BOM Structure for your "produced" goods. U first define your finished product as a Job or particular design i.e. A1. Then u state its BOM childs or raw materials of A1 - Window Curtain (metre square etc), A2 - Labour (for sewing), A3 other direct costs i.e. electricity.

A2, A3 are products u created with its unit prices. A1 is defined without unit price so that it derives from its childs as a total = unit X BOMQty. i.e. Each A1 is made up of A2 + A3.

During SO u can generate a Production (u have to create it manually, not like SO > PO) Then u have to do Internal Use to consume the inventory daily for A2 and A3. The accounting consequence shall be posted to Charge (Inventory Expense) That is contraed when u post Production process as it CR Product Asset (raws) and DR Product Asset (Finished Goods).

However this is not correct as u would have CR your raw A2 and A3 doubly. Nevertheless i m working on a production system that has solved such a problem. That is we do not define A2 and A3 as A1's immediate childs. Rather we define a process(!!). i.e. B1 which is "Make Curtain" and its childs are A2 and A3 (!).

I am finishing a production shopfloor system which takes the B1 (process) and display them as Queue for the shopfloor. The Queue window allows start and stop of the Process, thus giving alot of benefit to the shopfloor controllers as to what jobs are in queue (outstanding), in-progress (started), finished (stopped).

This shopfloor extension to compiere requires different plugins and i would hurry up its documentation if there is interested sponsor (to buy some of my programmers time to take over so i can sit and write undisturbed).

Meanwhile u can continue to contribute ideas for me to improve and share here.

regards
red1