RE: Centralized procurement
[quote user="Brian Kinser"]
yes exactly, using an intercompany design allows you to have an entire legal entity devoted just to procurement for intance, another legal entity might be retail/sales whereby every order is fullfilled by intercompany purchase orders that bsically mirror the original sales order, in fact you can setup this way to provide automatic or planned purchase orders for every sale thats made, when legal entity USMF makes a sale a coinciding purchase order is created in legal entity USMR, which actually check fullfillment by procuring the item from on hand inventory, order from vender or even execute the PO by purchasing from your MFG legal entity (USMFG) or your own 3PL (USPL) who may actually do the pick and pack or final assembly
of course the only issue here is the close outs, by having these distinct legal entities setup you are acknowledging that these are fully fledged operational business, if not somebody at HQ will have to close out the financial books for each of these legal entities each month/year and taxes will have to be balanced and accounted for...
you have centralized procurement out of the box with D365 however it is much more basic than described scenario above. You can have PO requests, approval workflows and just by security roles alone, no one outside of Procurement can do anything other than create a request....also planned PO etc is also centralized without using intercompany, it just depends on how centralized you need to do it.....in D365 there is only 1 procurement module so its already pretty centralized but....somewhere between out of the box and rube goldberg lies the solution
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We have 15 legal entities and 1 "top level entity". Let's call that HQ. Each state is it's own Legal Entity, but for SOME items we buy centrally and have them shipped directly from the vendor to each state (there is no centralized warehouse or DC), so we may have a 15 line PO issued by HQ with each line being a quantity for one state: each line will therefore have a different delivery address. Each entity still needs to buy it's own materials too, as some products cannot be shipped across state lines by law. I'm figuring that we could set some products up to buy from regular vendors and other products to "buy from" HQ, just so HQ gets the demand from all states and creates a consolidated PO
