All,

I think this is an oldie but a goodie but the answer has never been quite clear. Has anyone done consignment inventory in Baan IV? If so, how have you done this? What is the best way to do it? I have heard options like creating a second company, using a consignment warehouse, etc. But, if you want the inventory to be off the books and never show up on the balance sheet, what is the best method.

I would appreciate any feedback on all methods - successful or unsuccessful.

Thanks,

Ken

Hello, we have found this to be really tough in Baan IV.

We have setup consignment warehouses.
Maintain PO s & Maintain Receipts happen like normal,
and then when we transfer the goods out of consignment, we notify the vendor, and they invoice us. We then match against the the PO & pay.

We have mapped that warehouse so that it does not appear on in the financials.

This is not working very well, and we are looking at writing some custom code to handle this better.

I am very interested in what other people have done to solve this problem.

Many clients ago I ran into this. Their solution was to have another company where they stored the consignment inventory. After they ran MRP, they ran a single customized session that checked the planned MRP orders against the inventory in that other company. If there was a match, a new planned PO would be created (from a supplier that represented the customer's consignment inventory - and set up to do internal EDI) and the existing planned PO would be reduced/removed.

Then back to standard BAAN and confirm/transfer the planned PO's. A few side benefits of this were you could do it over and over for multiple customers and the standard financial reports could be run to see how much stuff you had of each of your customers.

It was slick in that there was very little customization - just the one completely new session. Made it very upgradeable

Cheers,

-Dennis