• From: Italy
  • Registered: 11/18/2013
  • Posts: 19

Topic: Any idea on how to automate manufacturing from sales order

Hi all.
I have a customer which is selling ice-cream ingredients AND ready made ice-cream.
When I need to process a sales order, everything is smooth and easy.
This is just a process of items input and no manufacturing is involved.
This kind of sales are directed to those ice-cream parlours which are then going to process the ingredients in their workshop.
Some other clients, on the other hand, are ordering ready made ice-cream and that involves manufacturing.
This is posing some problems.
First I have to move the ingredients need to make each specific flavours from the main warehouse to the factory area, so that their specific warehouse got enough "materials" to manufacture the specific item.
Then I have to make, for each flavour, a WO so that the factory can process the same.
Usually it is a long list of flavours and it is very much time consuming.
Is there any way to automate this process? Let's say a sort of batch command or a script?
Any hint or idea is more than welcome.
Thanks,
Carlo

  • From: Singapore, India, Chennai
  • Registered: 05/02/2009
  • Posts: 6,089

Re: Any idea on how to automate manufacturing from sales order

Just don't look at inventory and let inventory go negative. Later in one shot adjust all the inventory after the manufacturing is done. Very unprofessional but certainly quick and dirty.... Need to do some manual re-conciliation of the quantities where some thumb rules based on experience may be needed.

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  • elax
  • Senior Member
  • Offline
  • From: UK
  • Registered: 05/17/2011
  • Posts: 326

Re: Any idea on how to automate manufacturing from sales order

apmuthu wrote:

Just don't look at inventory and let inventory go negative. Later in one shot adjust all the inventory after the manufacturing is done. Very unprofessional but certainly quick and dirty.... Need to do some manual re-conciliation of the quantities where some thumb rules based on experience may be needed.

It's a tempting solution indeed (and I had to do it by the past), however it suffers from 2 major drawbacks :

The first is FA use an average costing method and it doesn't really work well with negative stock. Things are ok if you do a
straight forward scenario : invoice negative quantities at a given price and then make the missing amount of quantity.
Things get quickly messy (and buggy) if you start mixing : voiding transaction, using the same FA item for different real item with different prices etc .

The second, is you'll have to allow negative stock for everything, even items which are not manufactured. In my experience, when FA complain I don't have an item in stock, 99% of the time :  FA is right, and I'm trying to invoice/deliver the wrong item.

If you really want to follow the "negative stock" route, it's somewhat safer to pre-create some items (let's ay 100) and never FA be in negative stock.

/Elax

4 Reply by apmuthu (edited by apmuthu 11/17/2014 07:05:29 pm)

  • From: Singapore, India, Chennai
  • Registered: 05/02/2009
  • Posts: 6,089

Re: Any idea on how to automate manufacturing from sales order

Thanks @elax for your seasoned perspective. Using excessive stock or turning it into a service item may be the best for most instances after all!

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