Recommended settings for materials that acts as consumables in production

The core team has been engaged in a couple of requests about how to set up raw materials that acts as consumables in production. In these requests the following characteristics has been used for consumables:

• They are never stored in the raw material warehouse, but filled up directly at the production locations, therefore warehouse work for raw material picking is not needed for these materials.
• They often represent a low value and are not accounted for at time of consumption, but cycle counted at a periodic basis.
• They are often set up to allow for physical negative inventory to avoid blocking issues when they are back-flushed in production.

Here is how this scenario is enabled with and without enablement for the new warehouse processes

For products enabled for the advanced warehouse processes

• The product must be set up with an Item model group that allows for physical negative inventory
• Field Allow pick work center negative on the released products detailed page must be enabled
• Field Allow negative inventory on the ___location directive for raw material picking must be enabled
• The product must be set up in production to be consumed from a warehouse that allows for physical negative inventory
• The product will be picked from the product input ___location defined by the resource used from the route operation that consumes the material.

For products that are not enabled for the new warehouse processes

• Setup a default issue ___location either at the item-warehouse level or by the resource (resource consumption). This ___location will be defaulted to the production bill of material line, and act as the production input ___location i.e. the material will be consumed from this ___location.
• Use it in a warehouse that is WMS-enabled, and there is no problem setting up this product to allow for negative inventory.