Hello and Happy Near Year! I have seen variations of this question asked on here before - each with their own motivations. Our technical service department has a physical location within one of our buildings where they generally manage their own bins, stock, etc. They do jobs and bill for repairs. We also have some service vehicles that carry inventory with them. We also RMA things back to this location. Currently our Service area is just a bin. I am being asked (and fully believe it’s necessary) to upgrade that to either a warehouse or a site.
Are there any pros/cons that come to mind why I might choose one over the other? We are already multi-site and our users are familiar with the concepts of it. Physically, we have 1 building with 2 sites already in it. 1 for Aftermarket and 1 for Production. This would be a third site inside of the same building. I’m inclined to believe that less is more and a warehouse would simplify setup and ease transactions. But that’s why I’m here asking the question. Any sage advice?
For this scenario a warehouse with its own bins is easier. you will be able to ship from there and moving/stocking/receiving is easier. Site would be more if the facility was miles away and you wanted that transfer paperwork capability that comes with moving inventory from one location to another over several days.
I figured as much. The only reason I can think of why you might want a site over a warehouse is that part planning settings are tied to the site… so you can define default suppliers/min/max/source for Service that might be different than the rest of the building. There isn’t a way to granularly plan to the warehouse/bin level is there?
We went though the decision to split our buildings a couple years ago.
Our physical configuration fits into the Epicor technical/intended definition of different sites. (If it has a different street address, it’s a different site). We decided to go with warehouses instead of sites anyway. The main reason being we were in a situation where our staff was not already used to a multi-site environment, and the added complexity was not worth the benefits.
I believe there is. I think it may require a bit more custom/manual work, but you can define a lot of the same parameters on both the site and warehouse level WRT planning, and there are ways to drive demand from a sales order, job, etc to/from a specific WH.
Ultimately we found they were mostly similar with a few glaring differences. The biggest one for us was you cannot run MRP on a specific WH, but there are ways deal with that and other things.
I have used the Warehouse for service in the past and this works well as you can setup your service vehicles as bins and do bin transfers to the service vehicle from the main location to the vehicle to keep track of inventory. The Warehouse can also have a separate full physical inventory which makes it easier for auditing inventories when vehicles still need to be out working. You can also setup your bins in that warehouse as non nettable so they are not considered for MRP and supply records, as it can be difficult to issue materials on a service truck in the field to production.
NOTE that if you set a bin as non-net, then that inventory is ignored by MRP… if you have 1000 units in a non-net bin, and none anywhere else, and you need 1 unit, MRP will tell you to buy more. IF that is what you expect than it is good.
ALSO… re Warehouses vs Sites…
Cycle Counting and Physical inventory is performed at the WAREHOUSE level. This means that you can start a physical inventory for just one of the warehouses… do the count, and close the physical, all without affecting the other warehouses. This is GOOD because each is segregated.
I recognize the inherent risk here… in this case we keep certain filters/oil/misc parts on hand strictly for the service techs to be able to use when repairing our customer’s equipment. In this case, we would be manually writing orders to consume these parts as part of our repair order and our Service team would be expected to select the Service warehouse as the fulfillment source. I think this is exactly what we want.
