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Dears,

 

Could you help me out with designing the best flow for this process?

 

We, let’s say company B, buy a part from Company A using the purchase flow. We sell the same article to the end costumer,  with a costumer order.

 

However, when the article is broken and needs repair, the costumer returns it to company B. Company B will send it back to company A for repair, the repaired article goes back to company B and back to the costumer.

Articles are serial tracked.

 

Flow: A → B → End costumer → B → A → B → end costumer.

I’m struggling with how to send the article back to Company A and receiving it, after we shipped it to the costumer.

 

Thank you!

If you have this all setup with automated intersite, then you’ll have to have Company A buy it back from Company B - this is assuming that there are different costs or currencies involved between the companies.  Even if not using the automated intersite flow, you’ll still probably want to use a PO and a CO to buy it back.  Otherwise transferring direct will have inventory and cost implications that are not easy to track and are usually undesirable from an inventory control standpoint.  We do direct inventory transfers site to site but only within the same company.  When crossing companies, we use PO-CO.  Being serial tracked, I think that will make the PO-CO route more necessary, but I don’t have experience with that.


Dear ShawnBerk,

 

thank you!

 

However, if I use a PO/CO, the company A cannot use a RMA to repair the part they initially sold.

Is this solvable?

 

Best regards


Ahhh, yes, I see the difference, I was thinking of a return for credit, not for repair and tracking of the same part that will then go back to the customer.  That becomes much more complex because there is the decision of the repair being free of charge to the customer or paid as well as tracking the exact part.  I don’t have a simple answer for that scenario as it moves beyond just IFS transactions to how the business intends to operate.


Yes indeed. I was already afraid this flow doesn’t existing in IFS. But on the other hand, it is quite common: it’s the same process like bringing your broken cell phone back to the store where you bought it, and the retailer will send it to Samsung for repair.


Thanks for thinking along!


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