Normally this would be posted in a Tools group but since we see the phenomenon in costing, I thought I'd put it here.

We have three logistics companies in our Baan V environment. We also have three test companies which match the production companies and what you read below is occurring in our test companies. One of our production companies has been live in Baan V since Jan 1, 2003. The other two are scheduled to go live in October of this year.

We have a table-sharing structure established to accomplish two primary goals: give purchasing and sales as wide a visibility as possible and giving production control a narrow visibility. In other words, warehousing, sales, and purchasing data is shared across all companies while production and planning data are unique to each company.

This structure has served us well until yesterday. We are doing a test data load of our new logistics companies and we ran into a situation with item costing and inventory.

Items in each logistics company have their own standard costs. If Item A exists in Company A and B, it can have a different standard in each company. Since costs are unique to each logistics company the related tables are not shared. Inventory is shared across the companies so that purchasing and sales have complete visibility to activities in other plants. Even though our inventory files are shared, there is a primary warehouse for each logistics company: Company A - Warehouse A, Company B - Warehouse B, Company C - Warehouse C.

When we calculate costs in, say Company A, and take the step to Actualize Cost and Valuation Prices, Baan is revaluing inventory in all warehouses. Let me explain further. Say the same item exists in three warehouses (a very common occurrence) and we are in Company A and tell the system to Actualize Costs, it then creates integrations transactions to record the new cost of the inventory in all the warehouses where the item exists. So, actualizing costs in Company A creates financial transactions for inventory logically connected to Companies B and C as well (again, because the inventory is shared).

There is no warehouse parameter available in the Actualize session so we cannot restrict its focus to a target warehouse. We have experimented with separating the warehousing tables connected directly to costing - one set for each logistics company - but that seems to have no effect as the system still generates integrations for all warehouses where an item exists.

For what it's worth, our enterprise structure explicitly links these primary warehouses to a specific enterprise unit which is equivalent to a logistics company. All of these companies roll up to a parent financial company.

We feel we have a fairly common business environment in that we have multiple plants that supply each other as well as our common customers. We think other Baan users must also work this way and so we're hoping some BaanBoarders can share their experiences with this.

Each logistics company must have its own standard costs and the inventory in the primary warehouses related to each company must be valued at the standards in that company.

I know this kind of topic gets messy and I'll be glad to clarify anything I've muddled up. If anyone has suggestions ... well, we're all ears.