Dynamics Community Forum Thread Details

Navigating Project Inventory Challenges in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

I'm facing challenges in managing our warehouse, particularly for long-term projects, which we’re handling using project inventory within our D365 implementation. Our current approach involves booking stock directly against projects, which is beneficial for financial tracking but introduces several operational challenges.

Context:

We have multiple similar long-term projects running concurrently, and we book stock directly into these projects using D365's project inventory management. This approach allocates the costs directly to the approved project, reserves inventory specifically for the associated project, including allocations of stock location and serialized items.
This rigid booking method restricts our ability to adjust inventory dynamically across projects or allocate stock efficiently within the warehouse. As a result, items are often locked into specific locations, leading to difficulties in optimizing picking routes and overall warehouse operations.

Key Issues:

Inefficiencies in Picking Processes: Project-based inventory management lacks the flexibility to reallocate items dynamically, resulting in increased picking times and necessitating manual workarounds.
Pre-Allocation of Serialized Items: Serialized items are often tied to specific projects, complicating the picking process and increasing labour costs.

Ideally, we’d prefer to use a bulk stock warehousing approach rather than project inventory to allow greater flexibility. However, this raises concerns about ensuring items are reserved for the project that paid for them and the potential budgetary issues this could cause.

Questions for the Forum:

Have you encountered similar challenges in balancing project inventory with standard warehouse management within D365?
What configurations or customizations have you implemented to improve flexibility in inventory allocation and picking processes?
How do you manage the financial implications when transitioning from project-based inventory to a more flexible, bulk inventory approach?
We're currently using Standard Warehousing. Has anyone implemented Advanced Warehousing? We're concidering it, but seems like a kludge.

Hi,

Thanks for using the community forum for your question. The way you currently post the inventory is not project-based inventory. Instead, Dynamics 365 is consuming the items directly.
Once I had a similar requirement and tried to use as much as possible the standard features. Purchase orders were generated without a link to the project to prevent automatic consumption. The items were received in a "Project" warehouse. Using item requirements or sales orders from the project, the items were reserved for the specific projects. I can't remember all the details anymore. As the items are still available after the product receipt, it was possible to create picklists to get the items from the warehouse.

Basic warehousing versus advanced warehousing does not make a difference in case the items were consumed in the project already. Depending on your exact situation, advanced warehousing can be a fit or overkill.

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