How does everyone handle stocking orders?
Currently we create a sales order, job is created and has a demand of Make to Order. If you change the demand to Make to Stock it prompts a new job in the Planning Workbench since that Make to Order demand is gone.
Do you guys leave the demand as Make to Order and just put the quantity into stock when the job is complete or is no sales order created at all? Just a Make to Stock job? Whats the best way to handle these?
So you have a customer that orders and you are holding stock for them for future PO releases? I think I understood that correctly.
Right it sounds like it is the customer managed inventory process Kyle is describing.
Depending on the situation that may or may not work. For us we have customer managed that due to space ends up mixed with our other product. We don’t have the space to have customer managed bins so what we have done instead is created parts specific to a customer (even if it’s identical to stock). We get the added benefit of tracking costs end to end for that customer as well which is kinda neat. Couple ways to skin the customer stocking cat. We give their parts their own mins and maxes based on what they give us for forecasts and in our agreements they must take everything that has been produced for them which is easy to find too when it’s it’s own part.
Josh,
I see how that would work. Do you recognize revenue then only when it is shipped? The standard customer managed inventory process allows for billing when produced that I am not sure would be as easy or automated. But then would save the step of creating a Customer Managed PO.
Right until it ships we just hold it in regular old inventory as an asset which technically if we went out of biz tomorrow it would be. Until the customer sends us a PO it’s ours. There is an alternate path here too though where customers will send us a blanket PO with multiple long term releases months out. Those are all MTO then.
We mfg b2b through a distributor model so the less they have on their books the happier they typically are. We just ask that if we have fixed levels they can pull from that should they cease business with us they take everything we have of their part.