Customer owned inventory

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Posted on by Rosey

Is there a functionality in AX for customer owned inventory (consignment)? I see something for owner in tracking dimension, but have read that this is for Russian companies. My other thoughts are to create a separate item group for each customer's inventory or create customer locations or sites?! Any insight here would be helpful!

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Guy Terry 28,884 Moderator on at

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RE: Customer owned inventory

Hi Rosey,

It depends... on your requirements! Are you the customer or the vendor in this consignment stock scenario?

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Rosey on at

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RE: Customer owned inventory

Whoops, sorry, guess I didn't mention that. We are the vendor in the scenario.

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Guy Terry 28,884 Moderator on at

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RE: Customer owned inventory

OK. I think that's a scenario that AX offers less support for!

I assume the scenario is that you need to ship something to a customer, but keep it in inventory (but not in your real physical warehouse), and then invoice it some time later (at which time it disappears from inventory)?

I've never implemented Consignment stock from the vendor side, but I read the comments on here and it seems the approach is to use a Transfer order to get the inventory into a (virtual) customer warehouse. When you need to invoice it, you invoice it from that warehouse.

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Rosey on at

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RE: Customer owned inventory

We actually hold on to inventory for customers, we rent out storage space for our customers for a fee. It is a service we provide to our customers, like a storage unit, if they do not have warehouse space themselves.

So the inventory is actually physically there, and owned by the customer.

Thanks,

Rosey

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Guy Terry 28,884 Moderator on at

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RE: Customer owned inventory

Wow. Then you have a bigger problem! If you want the customer to own it, you have to invoice them. If you invoice them, the inventory will disappear. I can't imagine a solution. Hopefully someone else that can we be along....

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jgracak on at

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RE: Customer owned inventory

Hi Rosey,

Tell me if I understand this correctly:

- The customer gave you goods and those are physically placed in your inventory

- You charge them a service fee for rent

- The customer does not invoice you the goods they sent since they still own those

- Who does the selling? If you are talking about consignment then you are the one selling the items.

Usually what happens in these scenarios is that you would have a separate warehouse for their goods in AX and even keep track of the value of their goods in a separate GL account. The problem with AX here is that by standard you cant post to different GL accounts by warehouse, only by site (in NAV for example you can do it by warehouse). You are only receiving the goods and the customer does make any invoices. Once you sell their goods to other customers they send you an invoice for all the goods you sold and the circle is completed.

Kind regards,

Josip

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Ventsislav Tsankov 830 on at

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RE: Customer owned inventory

Hello, Rosey

If you don't sell the items on behalf of your customer, than this is not a consignment. The solution seems simple - you just have to physically track the items. I suggest you may

create different warehouse for customer items and create different Location for each customer.

I don't know if you use these same items for your own needs, but even if you do, than this seems a good solution.

There are no proper documents to receive and ship items for this scenario. You may use Item movement journal and set up proper posting.

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Vrod 5 on at

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RE: Customer owned inventory

This is not a unique situation, but there is no clean way of doing it. I have had several customers give me a PO and then told me to hold inventory until they need it.

1. Create a separate site for customer owned inventory so you can hold it and maintain inventory. This is a virtual site only for the purpose of holding and shipping the inventory at a later date.

2. You can create a customer ship to address labeled as Customer Owned also using the customer bill to address (you are not going to ship to the virtual site.)

3. Produce and ship the product to the Customer Owned address. (this will relieve your inventory and generate and invoice)

4. Now that your inventory has been relieved, you will need to make a zero cost inventory adjustment of the inventory you just shipped - into the virtual site.

5. Once you have done that, you can ship the product at a later date "at zero cost" from the virtual site using the AX sales order process.

This gave me an opportunity to product, ship and invoice the customer AND hold their inventory without impacting my main warehouse inventory and still maintaining control of inventory levels for customer owned product.

Hope this helps

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sencom 10 on at

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RE: Customer owned inventory

our process is a little different. we have automotive fleets that purchase up to 100 tires at a time but ask us to store them and use them as we get called for service calls.

step 1 sell the tires to the customer

step 2 store the tires in our warehouse and D365 (doesnt effect our inventory value at the store and we can distinguish which tire is for which customer.

step 3 get called for a service call and add 4 of the specific tires on the repair order and send the items with the driver.

step 4 bill the customer and that will relieve the inventory for that customer in our 2nd d365 warehouse.

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