I have done this a few times before, so generally you know how it is, you do what you are familiar with. In this case though I was thinking that it might be nice to get more opinions. So ideas please, given the following scenario, how would you go about it, business wise, and technology wise. There are so many technologies out there, that I am sure everyone has their preferences.
The situation is a company that have offices in multiple countries. All will work on the one SQL server via Citrix, no decision yet as to whether seperate companies or seperate databases. The basic business model is that the head office sells items to the other companies. In most cases, its somethign liek a drop ship, where Head Office drop ships orders to the End customer. So most orders need to be entered in the Country office, as a drop ship, then entered again in the Head office. Payments and inter-co payments also need to be made.
For phase one the client would accept a level of manual intervention, (though they don’t want to have to type orders in twice), an phase two would be fully automated.
working in multiple countries mean multiple financial entity, Different LCY’s, maybe different inventory costing regulations… so definately multiple companies.
as invoices, by using intercompany inbox and outbox you can fill the order in one company and send it to the other.
the functionality that you will loose in drop shipment cases is integrity of dates (delivery date, you will have to update them manually between companies.
The business model you are describing has you know, (even better than me) it’s direct shipment concept. A company will sell items to customer directly from vendor. But in this case vendor will be head office and will have NAV.
If you will use the same company to hold all offices you will have to make a few changes in direct shipment, because its focused in vendor / customer concept.
If you are using several companies / databases you will have to automate drop shipments between companies. In this case I would make it using shared tables (if in same DB) or has an alternative using MSMQ (in different DB’s). Then a scheduler to create invoices / orders.
IC posting would be starting point for this customization in automatic posting between companies. It could be eliminated some steps in IC to avoid user intervention.