Selling Phantom Items with Attain

We Wish to enter phantom items on Attain. This will involve entering the phantom onto the sales order line; however when production orders are created, they are created for the components. Equally; the components need to be shipped rather than the phantom. Ultimately, the invoice can show either the phantom and/or the components. Any one managed to do this without extension mods?

Hi Whilst it would not be flagged as a phantom item specifically, you can put the parent onto the sales order and use the explode BOM function. This will leave the parent on the order, but not as an item, and the components of the parent as individual requirements. Depends on the controls you have in place and the requirements of the parent being an item. Is it a true phantom where you never sell it or stock it, or is it a pseudo phantom that whilst usually not sold or stocked it can be if required. I hope this is clear and helps Steve

Thermopyl, while I am not a developer myself, I’ll describe in short the modifications I have made. New field in the item table “Inventory Posting Type”. It could be Normal or Phantom (and another type which is of no interest here. New table Sales requirement where components of phantom items is placed if the item in a sales order is Phantom. this works for nested phantoms, which might occur in a complex item structure. At salews order posting, the phantom id withdrawn, and the items in the sales requirement table are handled.

Hi, Attain has a feature called non-stock items. Can’t you use that instead? Lars Strøm Valsted Head of Project and Analysis Columbus IT Partner A/S www.columbusitpartner.com

Lars, when you first use a non-stock item it creates a normal item just like any other which can have stock and everything else. A phantom item is just an organisational tool to refer to something that is never stocked. So in this case, non-stock items don’t have any benefit over creating a real item in the first place. Where they are useful is if you create non-stock items for all the possible things you could order from a supplier (e.g. they send you a catalogue) and then it will only create items when you actually order them. Or you could load all possible combinations of your own products and then they would only become real items when you actually sold the first one. It saves the item table from becoming cluttered with items which may never actually be used. What it sounds like Thermopyl wants is something where he can take an order for one item but what he actually sends the customer is a collection of different items (e.g. a kit of parts). In which case, the solution Steve suggests is the one to use. Cheers, John

I have done a lot of work with Phantom Inventory. A simple version is fairly easy to implement, but would need changes to SOP for what you need. Mark Smart m_smart@usa.net icq: 128958106

The suggestion to use “Explode BOM” seems like a fairly easy one to use without customizations. It does require using the Inventory BOM functionality for the phantoms. Of course, when you are using the Attain Supply Chain functionality, the other items you make are defined as Production BOMs, which are different than Inventory BOMs. Edited by - jim Hollcraft on 2001 Oct 09 17:22:22