For all of our major manufacturing sites, we utilize four sites per company setup.  

2xx sites are for sales only and do not contain inventory, but have all saleable parts

3xx sites are for field service only and are used for work orders and service parts delivery

4xx sites are for service parts warehouse co-located at the factory to keep the inventories separated (separate purchasing, receiving, inventory, and even customer orders)

5xx sites are for manufacturing itself, this can be for direct orders to customers, connected orders to the sales site, and all financial connections are driven from this site.  This is the only site where shop orders, engineering, and projects are utilized.

So yes, for us, the pros of having multiple sites per company to keep business and revenue streams separate are well worth the cons of having them separate.  (copying parts site to site, keeping part costs in sync, a few other difficulties due mainly around duplication when necessary, but overall these cons are manageable with automation and migration jobs).

Hello ShawnBerk,

Thank you for the information.  Do you know if your Finance organization prepares separate Financial Statements, (ie. Balance Sheet, P&L, cash flows, etc.) for EACH Site, too?

Thanks,

Rick

They do not prepare things by site, only by company.

Co 10 is the US company and would have two manufacturing sites, one spares site, one service site, one sales site.  There are two manufacturing sites in the US, because one is a machine shop feeder to the other and doesn’t do direct sales or service work.  But all 5 of these sites are rolled up under one financial report for the whole US company.  

There are code parts that allow separating things where needed on a departmental, business, order, or project basis.

We have 2 factories in the same town that were set up as 1 site.  We have never been happy with that solution. Things like inventory reports, shop orders, parts etc are all by site and it’s so much easier to do reporting etc. with separate sites.