Variant used as On Hold Inventory

Dynamics 365 Business Central/NAV
1

We are on NAV 2018. Looking for an out of the box way to identify some of our inventory as “On Hold” versus “Good”.
2 ways I can think of to do this:

  1. Transfer “On Hold” inventory to a Location called “ON HOLD”.
  2. Create an Item Variant called “ON HOLD” and use that.

#1 won’t work well for us due to our warehouse mgt integration. #2 seems perfect to me but wanted to check if others have done it this way or some other way not listed here.

2

If you don’t want to use a second location (which is recommended), you could use a Bin. Nothing would prevent people from using it other than the naming, but you would be able to see Quantity available in both usable Bins and your On Hold Bin.

1 Like
3

Ben, thanks for the response!

I should have mentioned we have 30+ locations and are tightly integrated with a Warehouse Mgt System (currently Solochain soon to be Koerber/High Jump). If we had one location then maybe the Location idea works but as soon as you have more than one that solution gets ugly. I would need an On Hold Location for each Location, yuk. Plus we use lots of transfer orders and that solution would not work with a transfer order.

I do not know enough about bins but something tells me that might not be the correct fit for us.

Maybe if anyone has reasons to not use variants that might be what I am looking for. Pluses of Variants that solve all of my problems that I can think of :

  1. Variants are available in all document types (Transfer Orders, Sales Orders, Purchase Orders, Prod. Orders) so will just work out of the box. If our WMS System creates a Transfer Order from one location to another for “On Hold” inventory this works perfectly with Variants. (Our current solution is from an add-on where the concept of “On Hold” is only available in an item journal so I need to move away from this solution)
  2. Variants are actually a field in the Item Ledger and Value Entry which makes any kind of reporting/available calculations super easy. Item No., Location and Variant are the 3 out of the box fields that you can slice and dice your inventory by that just flow really nice.
  3. I will have 2 fields on Item Card (plus other pages) beneath Qty On Hand to display “Good” Inventory and “On Hold” Inventory so display won’t be an issue.
  4. Variants would work with the Item Cross Reference table if I need it to but currently isn’t a requirement.

Now what is the downside? One would be if we need to use variants for a product that needs real variants like different colors of a short or something like that (we do not need this). What else?

4

Jason,

Happy Holidays! Ben is correct Bins is the best practice solution, if you cannot make a separate location. My bigger question is within Solochain, soon to be High Jump, you must have Bins to allow for your put-aways and supermarket picking process. I wouold want to investigate this more before using Variants.

Variants have a purpose to allow for Items to have many extended classifications without creating another item card (i.e. Color, Size, etc…). Though your outline makes sense and I don’t see right now a downside, I would rather you utilize Bin processing and I am sure you have them in Solochain.

Thanks,
Steve