Pulling inventory from warehouse for service orders - how to communicate and monitor orders to the warehouse?

Question

Has anybody come up with an elegant solution for this?

Client wants to add inventory items to service orders to communicate to the warehouse that it needs to be shipped from the warehouse to client site (drop-ship to client)
- Client is currently shipping parts from the warehouse via sales orders in a normal distribution workflow for sales activity
- But what about service orders?
The client wants inventory to be decreased when the parts are shipped from the warehouse
There is no way to track parts that are shipped from the warehouse natively like with sales orders
Inventory items will not be decreased until the service order is billed

I’ve seen and experimented with a few solutions:

Use Workflow Stages or UDFs and monitor inventory shipping statuses via dashboard widgets
Additionally, transfer inventory from MAIN warehouse to “service” warehouse
- Effectively decreasing on hand inventory in the MAIN warehouse at time of shipping
Mark for PO / intercompany SO is created
- This seems like the simplest solution assuming intercompany
- In this case, intercompany is not in scope and client does not want another branch just to keep sales order workflows standard for the warehouse team

We’re leaning towards the following option, but it still seems like a weak solution. Does anybody have any other solutions or ideas?

Use Workflow Stages or UDFs and monitor inventory shipping statuses via dashboard widgets
Additionally, transfer inventory from MAIN warehouse to “service” warehouse
- Effectively decreasing on hand inventory in the MAIN warehouse at time of shipping

lairdtim · Answer

We put in a pretty hefty customization that basically did bullet 2. Service operates in their own warehouse and we have the customization that allows tying a transfer line to a service order line. We also do service parts directly to a customer, and the transfer supports tagging that service order line as one that goes to the customer’s address rather than the service warehouse.

We’ve been doing this for two years and I just started talking with our VAR about seeing if we can move from Transfer logic to PO logic. We don’t have intercompany, and I don’t think I’d want to go through the financial segregation to use intercompany. But a customization to handle the behind-the-scenes sales/AR and PO/AP documents, while relying on stock functionality for “Mark for PO” on the lines could be preferrable.

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