Let’s avoid the XY problem and I’ll just tell you what the higher ups want / expect.
Our parent company has acquired another company and their two facilities. We are now responsible for maintaining their inventories (which have overlapping parts with our facility).
These facilities will act as warehouses which certain orders are fulfilled from.
Just one warehouse per facility
They do no manufacturing at their locations.
Order entry is done at our facility
Purchasing can be done by any facility.
Orders that require manufactured parts will have those items made at our facility.
Orders may require manufactured items to ship from (or be picked up at) the other facilities.
Accounting wants separate GL accts for the inventory related transactions, for each site. I.E. an acct for our (the main) facility to be 1151-00-01, and others to be -11, -16, and -17.
Each sites Materials group wants to be able to their independent demand and supply outlooks. They do not want materials at other sites to be included in things like Time Phase reports.
All AR invoicing to be done by our facility
All AP Entry to be done by our facility
We have the Multi-Site module.
Obviously we don’t want to be multi-company. I started testing using multi-sites, but the Inventory is the only thing we want site specific.
Should we really just be a single site with multi-warehouse? This would only work if:
There are ways to “insulate” each warehouses inventory so that stock in the TX warehouse doesn’t show up as available for a mfg job in PA. And that parts on order (for delivery to PA) don’t show up as future stock available to TX.
There is a way to setup different GL Accts for each warehouse’s inventory activity (Inventory, WIP, Variance, etc…).
Multi site would more or less make have matching GL accounts for everything.
They want just one AP and one AR system. When creating an invoice for a shipment, doesn’t it have to be done in the site it was shipped from? Wouldn’t all the related GL Trans be to accts based on that sites Division?
Would AP invoice entry need to be done in the Site the PO was issued from?
If the three locations may have different part costs depending on warehouse then you will need multi-site. Multi-warehouse uses the same material cost for all warehouses.
Dale - I mentioned that to them, and they said that one costing would be used across the board. We use Average cost, so changes to a parts price from a receipt at one site, to another, would be acceptable.
Are there any decent Whitepapers on setting up just Multi-Site?
I have all the “Multi-Site Company Setup Technical Reference Guide” But that is really geared towards Multi-Company. And doesn’t differentiate which aspects are strictly for multi-company, and which are skipped for just Multi-site.
Add division to the GL structure.
Use the Division tied to the Site. This will address segregating the material/WIP/Rev/COS by site
When generating AR invoices from Get Shipments, just select “All Sites” instead of “Current Site”
AP Invoices do not care what site you’re logged into. You can invoice any PO receipt
We have multi site (plant) setup 905702A. The multiple plants have caused alot of headaches, but there are many benefits to it as well.
Our pump manufacturing company is setup with 2 manufacturing/repair plants and one solely repair plant. Pump Parts can ship from any of the 3 plants, but primarily ship from 2 of them. We enter sales orders at two of the plants, but any order entry can pull from any plant. We do all invoicing from one plant. We buyers in all 3 plants who can purchase for any plant, usually assigned based on types of parts being bought or based on vendor.
Historically, some of our difficulties with multi plant have been:
getting the sales order entry to provide correct plant on the release. Product group sales plant can be useful but can cause problems when overrides part master settings
Part setup - having to add all three plants to all parts, just in case a part is used in another plant; trying to maintain like variables the same on all 3 plants; inventory parameters on all plants
not being able to do cross plant jobs and desiring serial number tie to jobs in multiple plants
people changing part master to transfer part but not following through on all plant tabs, if truly want one plant to be distributor to other plants;
Printing full bill of materials that goes across plants for subassembly structure of parts made in other plants
having to purchase to one plant in order to buy in bulk at best price and then trying to setup inventory parameters on the plant that’s getting the inventory to pass on, but if put inventory variables for ss in other plants, get system wanting to add ss of all plants together to maintain…
Some our Benefits with multi sites (plants):
transfer orders work fairly well; we use system transfer times between plants instead of on per part basis
can do reporting of all financials independently if desired, can combine as needed
it has made it fairly easy to implement changes to business function of plants; can easily change e.g. this plant now does not sell parts orders, but they do all of the subassembly mfg, etc. That plant will do all repairs for this product group, etc.
If you had a shared warehouse, you can just do inventory transfers if needed. But Andy and Nancy post are right.
If you want to inventory or COS by plant, make sure you use STD posting rules. If not, then you can use EXT and let it use the accounts you have in AR/AP/IncCOSandWIP GL Controls
I’m sorry I wasn’t clear.
There is a setting in (905702a) company maint / plant config control / modules tab / inventory mgmt tab / transfer definition detail tab to enter the estimated transfer days to always use between two plants. E.g. we have 3 for our PA-WV then 5 for our PA-TX.
Also, you may already know this, but in case not, there’s Plant maint / detail tab that has Transfer Requirement Planning that tells system whether to auto create transfer orders and allow shipments without transfer order etc. We were trying to figure out for months why one guy was creating transfer orders he swore he wasn’t and it was because he was firming jobs that sometimes needed transfer order.
Shipments from different sites obviously are different packers. There are settings in the Customer Maint that allow you to include multiple shipments on one invoice, and another to limit the invoice to just one sales order.
The settings are on the Billing -> Detail tab of Customer Maint.
The settings above would allow shipments from different packers to be on the same invoice, but only if they were from the same sales order. If I wanted shipments from different packers from different orders to be combined, I’d have to check the “Consolidate Sales Orders” box too.
Epicor has two different things that sound alike. Inventory Transfer is a simple transaction of “take this stuff and now it’s in another place.” But Transfer Order is different. It has a receipt, a price, tracking number etc. Under certain conditions you can just “do an inventory transfer” means no formal order, the stuff is just moved. But “enter a transfer order” is where you set up a record at a site that says source it from the other site, it takes 3 days to get there, it must be formally received, etc. There are even Transfer Order Suggestions. I thought it was as simple as single/multi-plant. But based on the posts in this thread, that’s more complicated than I thought in a multi-site company.
Hi, Calvin.
we have three sites configured, we have reviewed the option that you give us and if you generate an invoice for two different orders as long as they are from the same site, the shipments otherwise generate invoice per site.
We need to generate an invoice when we have shipments from different sites for the same client.
I see what you mean. I did a test of trying to invoice two packers from different sites, and it created two invoices.
While we often ship from multiple sites for the same order, we rarely would want these to be on the same invoice. In the cases we do want it, we do a Misc invoice (but that has its some of its own problems).
If I remember correctly, I believe this is functioning as intended because shipments from 2 different locations can have 2 different tax liabilities and tax is calculated at an invoice and is related to where goods are shipped from.
