Trying to create a 3PL Supplier in IFS CLOUD

@AsahiNick I fail to understand why having one non-inventory purchase part and multiple supplier for purchase part wouldn’t work for your scenario. Maybe you could provide more details on this?

I was working for one customer at some point and what was implemented was:

• forwarder definition and linked with Supplier Id

• 

• then in the Shipment - select the forwarder
• we have created a custom command in the Shipment Header → create Purchase Requisition for Forwarder → will take the supplier Id linked with the forwarder and create a Purchase Req line for the Transport purchase part.
• Procurement will set the correct price for the PR and then convert to PO

Hi Marcel, the issue we’re trying to address is that we face a scenario where our client can source the materials they need from multiple suppliers, and as it seems that neither they nor their suppliers have their own transportation capabilities, they then have multiple transportation service suppliers. We don’t know yet (as we only one one Product Data sample provided to us) if they can use multiple combinations of Transportation suppliers and Materials suppliers, or if there are fixed relationships between the 2 (for example if they buy the Material from Supplier A, the transportation will always be bought from Supplier 1)

We assume due to the nature of the clients business that they will never combine shipments of multiple Materials from the same supplier into a single transportation supplier order.

Our current issue is that although we’ve been able to set up the Multiple Suppliers for the Inventory Parts for their Materials, as long as we go down the path of trying to use Non-Inventory parts to represent the Transportation services we can’t link a Suppliers for a Part to them, in the same way that we can for the Inventory Parts. 

We’re trying to find a way of establishing the 3 way relationship between i) The Inventory Part Number, ii) The Materials Supplier that we’re going to order that Inventory Part from, and iii) The Transportation Supplier that we’re going to use to get the Materials to our facility. 

Hi @AsahiNick,

May I know why are you not using Purchase Order Charges functionality.

You can simply create a charge type for transportation costs and can use in any number of Purchase Orders. We just need to change Invoicing supplier in Purchase Order Charge tab.

Hope I understood your requirements correctly.

Regards

Abdul Rehman

Hi Abdul, many thanks for your response we haven’t considered the use of Purchase Order Charges as the scenario we’re facing is that we are always going to require 2 purchase orders one for the materials from one of the material suppliers and a second PO for the Tansportation from one of the transportation suppliers so your charges solution is only going to work provided we can create something to represent the Transportation service that we need so that we can raise an order for it and can link the 3 potential suppliers to this transportation part so that we can select which of the suppliers to place the Purchase Order with 

Hi @AsahiNick ,

First, I am not sure what objective you are trying to achieve by linking 3 Potential supplier with Part. This exercise would only make your master data complex to understand and maintain. Afterall only one supplier would be used for actual transaction and that can be achieved by simply changing Invoicing supplier in Purchase Order Charge tab.

Second, by creating separate Puchase Order for transportation, system would not load transportation cost on invention value.

Is it not required to load transportation cost on to inventory value.

​​​​​​Regards

Abdul Rehman 

Hi Abdul, many thanks for your ongoing engagement in this conversation. The data that our client has provided us with is that for at least one item within one product structure they can purchase it from one of three suppliers and can then have the order shipped to them by one of three shipping suppliers. It would make sense if there were a 1:1 relationship combination between a part and shipment suppliers but we don’t know this. Obviously they can only place an order for the demand on one of the three part suppliers and as I’ve mentioned previously this is not an issue for us the challenge we’re facing is that as we need to be able to order the transportation from one of three possible suppliers we’re trying to find a way of defining it as an item for which we can place a purchase order but for which we need to be able to define multiple suppliers so our client can select the one they want