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.