Help with Inventory location for Equipment returned for Service

Finance and Operations/AX User Forum
1

Greetings,

My company has been using AX since '06. [Originally, we were using the Thy service module for all of our service orders.]

We performed an upgrade to AX2009, and at that time switched to the service module that Microsoft provides with AX 09.

This has been working fine. Recently, it has been decided that we would like to bring the equipment returned for repair to an inventory location in AX; something we have not done in the past. Previously we issued RA and just kept incoming repairs in a designated physical location with the AX relationship being the service agreement and consequent service order only.

The initial meeting produced the following:

First we created a new warehouse called “service” with two repair locations; one for warranty and one for billable equipment on our test server.

  1. Create service order and provide return authorization.
  2. Using item requirements for the new service order, make a negative requirement for the part number and serial number of the equipment coming in.
  3. When the equipment is received, execute the pro-forma invoice placing the equipment into one of the two locations in the service warehouse.
  4. The equipment stays in inventory until work is complete, at which point it is then picked out of inventory through item requirements, creating a wash cost-wise.

The problem is that bringing the item back into inventory “out of thin air” like we are, the system is counting dollars and adding to the GL account, even though it is being picked back out to the service order. Since we cannot modify the inventory model groups and dimensions on the equipment, is there a way to bring these items in transparently? is there a different way to track the equipment in AX? We need, part number serial number and cost at minimum.

I am working on this in the AX-09 test environment and am willing to experiment with any suggestions. Thanks very much.

2

In part it depends upon the costing method, but ultimately if you bring it in then it has value, whilst this is fine for insurance purposes and makes it visible it is not for inventory asset because it is not your inventory. The approach here is to remove the value in these warehouses from teh inventory asset (journal if you like) and exclude them from the report. There is no way to bring the item in transparently whilst tracking it correctly, but you can negate this depending upon the setup and processing but as the items are already configured it makes it more difficult.

3

Thank you, Adam.

If I understand correctly, since the item has already configured and carries with it all of the costs and dimensions, this way is not going to work. I will be unable to change any settings at all for the items, they must remain the same. What type of journal would you use to move it into the inventory location without having the cost affect GL?

4

Hi John

The dimension groups control elements as do the inventory model groups, and changing anything here has to be managed very carefully. You can change the dimension group and inventory model group of items, but in reality you should not.

You cannot move stock into an inventory location without impacting on the GL which is why you filter it out.

You could with different sites set costs to be zero, but I am not sure you can have a separate site in your setup. If you can I believe this is the way you could achieve this because you can configure the cost at the site to be zero, although from memory returning stock with zero is an issue, so it would need to be a movement/profit and loss journal.