Subcontractor work

I am using AX 2012 and trying to understand/implement subcontractor work. I have been able to create a production order that generates a purchase order for an outside service. This outside service is sometimes the last operation in our route and then ships to the customer from our vendor’s address. Other times, we bring the product back from the vendor after their service is complete, then we finish production and ship it to the customer.

How do I portray the physical activity of shipping partially finished goods to the vendor for the outside service? We need to see that they were sent, and then be able to receive them back in.

Can someone provide a little insight on how this should be done?

Thanks!

It depends in part on the process, but you can have sub-BOM’s and sub-production to create the part finished product and then out-source this, or you can route link the consumption of items to a set operation, and then when you start this operation you flush the material. You could have a sub-contractors warehouse where the goods are drawn from, the fact there is no stock there will, if planning is configured, create a transfer order to get it there and this imitates the stock movement if this is required.

There are quite a few options, but you have done the hard part getting the setup working with the vendor type operations and creation of the purchase order. The rest is really trying to map the process and the process requirements to what AX can do out of the box.

Thanks for your response. I still can’t seem to auto-generate the transfer order though. I am using planning for the creation of the production order. The product in question does not have sub-boms or sub-productions in its hierarchy. It is a flat, three-operation route where the third operation is performed by an outside vendor. I don’t know where the transfer order should come into play. I set the bom-line for the service item to our transit warehouse (vendor warehouse). I set the resource for that operation to have an input warehouse as our transit warehouse. Neither one of these seems to help create the transfer order. I could manually create the transfer order, but I wouldn’t know what to transfer because the bom is only one level deep. On the list of current production jobs, there is a transport task scheduled. But I am not required to do anything special with it. That transport task is completed when I report the last operation as finished.

I am missing something somewhere, I just don’t know what.

On the item coverage of the items you are moving to the vendor warehouse is it set to draw from your main stores? I am not sure of the first two operations, but in this scenario you need to send all three parts to the sub-contractor even though in reality they maybe one at this stage as you have no sub-BOM. WMSII is not my area which you are clearly using but this should not prevent teh planning flow of material