We manufacture products that can be sold all over the world. Some are labelled differently (depending on the country it needs to go to), some are not.
We are currently using the Size dimension (renamed as country) to split out the stock within the system. Now for some reason it was deemed a good idea to separate stock within the system, that is the same physically/same label. This was for customer service to be able to see “That stock coming through is for X country”, this is leading to an overload of transfers due to planning and customer service trying to utilise stock from other countries that they’ve either ordered too much of, or cancelled their order for.
Physically they’re segregated, as it has to be because it’s segregated in the system and would be a nightmare otherwise for stock checks (as I said though, physically the products are no different). So a lot of the time we’re finding that we’re virtually transferring to fulfil a lot of orders. Then you have scenarios where transfers are happening in the system, but not physically (control issue within the business), but it wouldn’t be the case if we could limit the use of the storage dimensions.
I can’t personally think of a scenario that’ll eliminate this issue. Possibly setting all the countries that are physically the same and same label as one Size, and then possibly add a field to the customer that populates the sales order and follows the product as a reference within transactions, but not actually stocked by it. No idea if that is even a good idea- as I said I’m not sure how to conquer this issue whilst letting customer service view what’s for their orders at a glance. Maybe something will have to give and may need to do a slight bit of digging to see what’s for what size and remove the transfers?
It’s adding a lot of time to processes, and making planning a bit of a nightmare.
Has anyone come across a similar issue, or the same.
All help is welcome/appreciated.
Thanks in advance