Question

Use of remote warehouse and transport tasks

  • 24 February 2021
  • 2 replies
  • 549 views

Badge +3

Hello,

We have a scenario where we need to transfer some of our inventory to be held in long term storage using a third party storage facility. We would then transfer some of that stock back to our location on an annual basis, based on forecasted demand. 

We will still own the material, and we want to be able to see the quantity of parts held in stock at that location so that MRP doesn’t try to plan any new purchases. However, we would need to allow a lead time of say 2 weeks to allow the transfer of any material back to our site. If we had some unexpected demand pop up, we wouldn’t want the stock at the off-site location to show as immediately available.

I was looking into the use of remote warehouses & transport tasks to cover this. We have never used these so don’t have any experience with the set up etc. We are a single site company and have always maintained our inventory on site, as company owned material.

I created a new remote warehouse with an availability control & transferred some stock to it. All of this was fine, and worked with MRP as expected.

However I have not found the transport tasks function very helpful. You don’t seem to be able to schedule these for a future date, nor do they seem to have any lead time associated. So, if I create a transport task it looks like the stock will become available straight away, on the date the transport task raised.

 

I was just wondering if anyone could offer any advice or suggestions for how to manage this? Perhaps there is something I’ve missed in the set up or some other functionality that could be used?

 

We are on Apps 10, UPD 8, using IEE.


Any help would be appreciated!

Thank you,

Steph.


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2 replies

Userlevel 5
Badge +9

Unfortunately the date and lead time handling for transport task that you ask for is not there in APPS10. Supply and demand ends up on same date.

We have introduced a new concept for stock movement in IFS Clouds that will be launched the March 10, 2021 https://www.ifs.com/corp/news-and-events/events/ifs-cloud/

This new concept for stock movement is called Shipment Order and includes date and  lead time handling similar to customer order and purchase order. The Shipment Order is executed through normal Shipment and Receipt processes and can send between sites and/or remote warehouses. The Shipment Order is also considered in supply and demand, where the planned due date (i.e. the planned picking date)  is used on the demand and the planned receipt date is used on the supply. 

The idea is that Transport Task will be mainly used for stock movement within the four walls of the building, while the Shipment Order will be used when the material leaves the building i.e. for stock movements between sites and remote warehouses.

 

 

Badge +3

Hi Fredrik,

Many thanks for your reply. Shipment orders sound promising! But unfortunately, even if we do look to move to IFS Cloud, I’m not sure it would be in the timescales we need as we are going to have to find a way to manage this requirement in the next month or so.

 

It may be that we will have to just use transport tasks as they are for now and manage without being able to plan in the lead times that we wanted.

 

Thanks again.

Steph.