During a recent prospect demonstration, an interesting question came up regarding sales order management, product configuration, and serialized manufacturing.
Scenario:
The customer manufactures custom-configured vehicles using chassis supplied by an external manufacturer. Each chassis has an assigned VIN, which is used to track the vehicle throughout production.
A customer may initially place a single sales order for 10 vehicles, all with identical configurations. However, due to chassis availability and varying inventory lead times, the vehicles may not enter production simultaneously.
For example:
- One sales order is entered for 10 identically configured vehicles.
- The first three chassis become available and enter production immediately.
- Four additional chassis arrive several weeks later.
- The remaining three enter production once their chassis become available.
- Each vehicle is tracked individually by its manufacturer-assigned VIN once production begins.
Business Requirement:
Although the customer initially places one order for all 10 vehicles, the manufacturer would like the ability to subsequently split that order into 10 individual sales orders, each retaining the original configuration.
This would allow each vehicle to have its own sales order, production timeline, VIN association, and ultimately an individual bill of sale.
Question:
Does Acumatica support a standard workflow for splitting an existing sales order containing multiple quantities of an identically configured item into separate sales orders while preserving the original configuration details?
More specifically, I’m interested in understanding how this would interact with the Product Configurator and Manufacturing modules, particularly if production orders have already been generated for some of the vehicles.
Would the recommended approach be to split the sales orders before generating production orders, or is there a more appropriate workflow that allows the original sales order to remain intact while independently managing production, VIN tracking, and billing for each vehicle?
Interested to hear how others have approached similar scenarios involving configured, serialized products with staggered production schedules.
