I am investigating a possible solution regarding finished goods inventory levels. Can the finished goods inventory levels in ERP LN be generated via a CSV, XML or EDI message?

We have several suppliers that ship and warehouse components on our behalf. Because we do not have access to their warehouse floor we do not know how much inventory they have. We would like to update the finished good inventory levels for these items by receiving an export ideally a .CSV file from their ERP System.

Has anyone done or heard of something similiar? Are there any tools or applications that would integrate with ERP LN in order to provide this functionality?

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

Hi efischer,

did I get you right, that your suppliers manufacture and store finished goods, that you sell directly from their warehouse? Who is the owner of the goods?

1) You are the owner
You should purchase the goods from your supplier in a normal way, just to another warehouse. Sales orders would refer directly to this specific warehouse.

2) The supplier is the owner
This is a typical "Direct Delivery" order. There is a flag in the salesorderline that marks it for Direct Delivery. A referring purchase order can be generated automatically. Direct Delivery means, the supplier is reponsible for shipping the goods directly to your customer. Those goods never touch your warehouse. Speaking in Baan terms: there will be no inventory movements in none of your warehouses.

Both cases basicly do not require any manual adjustment of inventory.

However, if you want to adjust inventory for whatever reason, why don't you use cycle counting orders for an update? You may import the values directly into the tables and the process the orders afterwards. This is a proven and "clean" way to update inventory values.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Martin

Yes, Martin our suppliers produce and warehouse goods on our behalf. We own the materials at time of sale. This process is triggered by an inbound ASN from the supplier. One thing that I did not mention was that many of our finished goods are made up of multiple consigned componenets that we own at the suppliers warehouse. Our consigned component suppliers ship their product that we buy into our suppliers factories. The manufacturing supplier then uses the consiged components to build a finished good. At time of sale we backflush the finished and component goods from our inventory.

In order to ensure that our suppliers have enough finished goods inventory on hand to meet our customer requirements we need how many finished good items they have in stock. We do not wish to manually key this information into our system every time they produce an item based on the volume of transactions that occur each day. Instead we would like a way to automatically update our finished good inventory via a .CSV export from them. The .CSV file would include infromation like part number, qty, buyer name, seller name.

could I update the finsihed goods inventory level by importing a .CSV file through the cycle counting orders form?

Thanks for your assistance.

could I update the finsihed goods inventory level by importing a .CSV file through the cycle counting orders form?
Yes, you have to insert the values into the cycle counting order table in your database and than process the orders.
However this approach has several disadvantages:

in Baan IV the shortest interval for cycle counting orders is 1 week. In other words, you can process cycle counting orders only once a week. I'm not sure if this is applicable for you. I also don't know whether Baan ERP LN has the same restrictions.
if I got you right, you won't use production orders for the items that get manufactured by your supplier, correct? How do you evaluate future demands of materials if you don't have any planned inventory transactions?
from the financial point of view, the process you mentioned is also rather questionable..
From the things that I know so far, I'm pretty sure that your problem can be solved with subcontracted production orders. How would it work?:
The items you sell are manufactured items with a single operation ("assembly") which is defined as subcontracted in the routing tables. According to the report of your supplier you will report those orders complete. This ensures proper inventory movements in separate warehouses, "clean" cost price calculation and costing :) . Any objection?

Regards,

Martin

I am diffently a newbie at this.... Thanks for your help!

I will look into using the cycle counting process in order to update the finished good inventory levels. Do you know if the values in cycle counting can overwrite what is in finished goods or is it only an adjustment? Say I wanted to adjust my finished goods and i currently had 100 pieces could i just import a CSV file that had a qty of 25 to change the actual inventory to 25 pieces or would that file only adjust the actual 100 pieces to 75 or 125 pieces?

By production orders do you mean the build plan generate by ERP LN or do you mean the customer sales schedule? I belive that you mean the build plan that is generated by ERP LN.

If this is the case then the future demand of materials doesn't matter to us becuase we are not scheduling the production of goods or the receipt of components. We only need to ensure that are manufacutring locations are doing it and doing it well.

Inventory transactions would occur through the receipt of an advanced shipment notice along with the receipts of component goods. Based on the customer forecast ERP LN would be program to create finished goods in the approriate warehouse and would relieve the inventory at time of shipment. For example the customer schedule request 50 pieces, ERP LN generate a build plan of 50 pieces and then move 50 items into the supplier warehouse upon receipt of the ASN ERPLN would remove the 50 pieces always maintaing zero finished good inventory. We pay our supplier on production (ASN triggers this process) and we are paid by our customer on the receipt of the finished goods at their facilitiy.

I have another question regarding the production build plan. Is there a way to modify the plan via .CSV import or other file type? The production build plan that ERP LN generates would not mean anything to us because we cannot account for preventive maintenance, downtime or other issues at our supplier facilities. Becasue of this we would like to import the suppliers build plan which would take their proccesses into account.

Thanks!

efischer,
cycle counting orders contain the actual inventory. The adjustment is done by the system.

I hope you don't mind, but I still disagree with your approach in this case. It should be possible to solve your problems with standard functionality. What industrie are you in? Who is your consulting partner? You will definitely run into problems if you are going to "customize" your system in this way.

Feel free to contact me by mail and we may have a more detailed discussion on the phone.

Martin

Hi efischer,
I concur with Martin. Also you can write, for example, new BaanERP session that reads those CSV files and automatically fill in the values from those file to appropriate subcontracting PO/MO via API. This way, you get:
proper recording of events inside BaanERP (via subcontracting Manufacturing Order)
very minimal need for users to key in data to BaanERP screens
Sounds good, doesn't it?

Rgds,
Paul