I’m working for a shipping company that has been running NAV 5 for a few months now for purchasing, internal maintenance orders, fuel sales, and customer invoicing. We are looking to replace our external logistics/manifesting system which operates at all of our shipping terminals with NAV (it is a totally standalone system right now).
Essentially our terminal users receive one or more items from a customer to ship, the item gets assigned a unique ID and a location (where it was received), then the user enters its customer information, weight, dimensions and destination. Our shipping clerks filter by location and destination and create manifests by adding available items and assigning a vessel for transportation (which updates the items as in transit). As the freight moves through the system items may be added to the manifest or items may be split off into other manifests until finally the items reach their final terminal and are then flagged as delivered.
Is there a compelling reason to try and use NAV functionality (like transfer orders, since all locations and transport vessels are set up as locations in NAV) to do this, or is this best handled as a database exercise with limited links to NAV (like say invoicing the sales order once the items are marked delivered)? I’m new to NAV and looking for recommendations as to how to set this up and where it might make sense to integrate (ie: is it worth the complexity of trying to create these items in NAV just so we can use transfer orders to move them instead of just updating a field in a non-NAV table).
It depends on number of items number of customers.
If you are a high volume transaction/items/customers. I would suggest against it.
Every transaction will be left in ILE and it will create costing/ financial/ performance implications.
If you do go with the Transfer Order Item. At least just have one generic Item. Item 2010, 2011 for each year.
Location would be Cust2010, etc so that every year you would change and use a new item.
If you use customer as destination location and create many location, running MRP would be very slow. Same applies if you have many items.
I would have to know more of the requirements to come to a conclusion, but I’m stating my experience based on customer databases.
Also I suggest against some process to sync/auto post sales order with transfer Order.
You could just on sales order add additional fields required to track the item till it gets received at customer.
Thank you for the reply. A bit of clarification on how things work now: a sales order will almost always contain just a single line with the price for shipping a certain weight or volume of goods to a destination, and this line might correspond to anywhere from one to potentially dozens of items that will be received and added to shipping manifests later, so creating a single item per customer per year will definitely not work for tracking. Also, the client is manually planning the few items that they do stock and sell (or use for maintenance purposes).
I’m perfectly fine doing this entirely apart from NAV, but I get the feeling from my boss he’s looking to use more NAV functionality than just the ability to add new tables and forms that don’t really have anything to do with any core NAV functionality. I’d like to throw him a bone with any integration that does make sense, but the best I can come up with is kicking off the invoicing of a sales order when the items in the manifesting portion that are associated with it are delivered.
An Item can have additional properties where you can track it.
For example you can use Serial/ Lot/ Variant as a way to track that entry.
As for few items that you do stock, you can create items for those.
Do you take ownership of items that you are shipping?
if you are going to use Items. The item have to come into the system, either through Purchase Order, or through positive adjustment, and then you can move it around (Transfer) to different locations.
If these are Item time used items, it doesn’t make sense to create unique items for them
What is your transaction volume. How many items are you shipping per day?
We are shipping around 200 items a day from over a dozen locations. Our primary requirement is simply to place these customer owned items into manifests and then onto vessels for transport. I’m thinking trying to use NAV for this is going to be more work than just creating separate tables and updating them myself based on user input. Why bother taking user input and creating transfer orders or adjustments in the item journal to change locations when I can just update the location field on the item record in a non-NAV table I maintain? It seems much simpler, but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing out on some useful value NAV actually could add to the process.