We have a case where a purchase part is received into inventory, we then ship it out to a subcontractor, that subcontractor ships directly to another subcontractor for a second subcontract operation and then it is shipped back to us as a completed part.
Does anyone have this situation and how do you do it?
Today we have a method with 2 subcontract operations and the buyer is manually changing the paperwork the first subcontractor receives to send it to the second subcontractor and not us. The buyer will also receive in the first subcontract shipment once they are notified they shipped it to the next subcontractor and do the subcontract shipment on the second operation. Its manual and leave a lot of room for error.
Since there isn’t an official way, as @dcamlin mentioned, you’ll probably need to do some customizing.
To address the first issue of manually changing the paperwork (I’m assuming this is the PO Form), my first inclination would be to use a BPM to identify Purchase Order Lines linked to the jobs with a second subcontract operation, and then call a function to change the shipping address of the purchase order. That should at least lighten the load on your buyer on the front end.
As for the second issue, I think having the buyer receive the first subcontract they way they currently do is probably your best option. You could probably use a BPM to automatically trigger the subcontract shipment on the second operation. It might even be worth creating a dashboard / Kinetic Application that only brings in those particular jobs, and create a function that can be called to Receive the first Subcontract operation and create the shipment for the second one. That way your buyer still has the manual control, but can do the work more quickly.
Note: With any automation that’s going to create a record, you’ll want to do some heavy testing to make sure it works exactly as you need it to.
We have done a few flavours of this for our customers, the last time, we did it, we automatically spun up an MTS job, with the sub-con operations on there.
On issuing the material, it it performed the subcontractor shipment entry and stage ship confirmation for the first sub-contract operation.
A dashboard then allowed the user to update when the first subcontractor had shipped a qty to the second. This then automated a receipt and a second subcontractor shipment.
When the parts were received in, we we automated the job receipt to inventory to put them into stock.
All of this is quite straightforward, the issues come, when the first subcontract damages, or loses a qty.