In situations where you are using co-manufacturers (comans, TPM's) to do some of your order fulfillment, it is sometimes the case that you need to track inventory at the coman's location. For example, you may place an order for the coman to make/manufacture your finished good, and when complete, the PO is received into a site within your ERP that represents on-hand at the co-man. See the overall description with example in the Co-Manufacturer Transfer Sync article.
When this is the case, the PO is then closed, and SIQ loses visibility to the inventory that is then likely to move from the coman to one of your sites. If the generation of transfers is handled in a more manual fashion from coman to your site, then it can be difficult for StockIQ to plan your normal warehouse, as we don't have normal visibility to the state of the supply chain, and orders already in progress.
To help account for this, you can mark sites in StockIQ as type "Comanufacturer" in the Site data feed (128 = Coman), and we will enable a supply forwarding feature.
Purchase Order Forwarding
This feature relies on the assumption that when a PO at the coman is completed, it will shortly be forwarded to whatever location is its spoke location. Only two things are required in the data:
- The type of the Site into which the co-man PO is received is of type "Comanufacturer" (128)
- There is a hub-spoke association between the Co-man site (hub) and the inventory's next destination (spoke) - presumably a warehouse within your network.
- NOTE: that the next step can be a distribution hub of your own that also sends inventory out to other spokes, it just has to be a spoke relative to your co-man site
StockIQ will then take the following actions:
- A supply order of type transfer will be auto-created between the coman --> your site.
- It will be called "COMAN-<original order number>", and comments will be added to it that it's being created for the inferred transfer from coman to your site.
- The Order Header's OrderCreationDate, ReleaseDate, and ExpectedReleaseDate will be set to the Planned Receipt Date of the first line of the co-man PO (e.g. the transfer is assumed to be created on the date the co-man PO is to be completed and received
- For each line in the original order, a new line will be created in the inferred order with dates as follows:
- PlannedReceiptDate = (Original PlannedReceiptDate) + (Lead Time between the sites)
- ExpectedDockDate = PlannedReceiptDate - (Putaway Time at destination)
- ExpectedShipdate = ExpectedDockDate - (Shipping Lead Time between sites)