Part 4: Reserve against all inventory in Dynamics NAV?

With a title very similar to my last post – have we covered this already? Well no, as this relates to the missing option for quarantine inventory within Dynamics NAV. How do we ensure that sub-standard or defective items are not reserved and an instruction to pick and despatch them is sent to the warehouse?

So in my experience most companies have a quarantine area where defective items are put prior to being disposed of. In NAV this lends itself to identifying a number of bins as the quarantine bins and not allowing inventory in those bins to be reserved. There’s a problem with that though in that reservations are against item ledger entries not warehouse entries. What’s in each bin is controlled from the positives and negatives in the warehouse entries. The two don’t match as internal movements and don’t even have an item ledger entry.

This is an issue for planning as well so most companies in my experience end up running a separate ‘virtual’ location where questionable inventory is put.  All sales returns are set to return to that location so the items are not taken into account when planning replenishment for example and also are unable to reserve against until inspected and transferred back into the main location.

Is this ideal – no  – and I’ll be so happy the day that Microsoft introduce a way of quarantining inventory into NAV properly that I’ll run round our local town centre naked singing Pharrell Williams’s ‘happy’ to illustrate my joy.

In the meantime a separate location is the best we’ve got.

Note

This post is part of a 6-part series. A link to rest of the posts in this series are below (updated as published);

Author: James Crowter

I’m passionate about how businesses can improve their efficiency by getting process optimal more of the time. For the last twenty five years I’ve worked to help organisations of all sizes and types implement the ERP & CRM software that typically they decide they need when things are going wrong. I’ve seen that work unbelievably well and enabled those organisations to rapidly grow but I’ve also had some hard projects over that time where it’s felt more like warfare at times. Since 1996 (and version 1.01) I’ve been working with a small Danish product called Navision that’s now become Microsoft’s Dynamics NAV and I’ve also been using and consulting around Microsoft CRM since 2005. As managing Director of one of the longest established first Navision and now Microsoft Dynamics partners I’ve been involved in the complete history including numerous product councils and system design reviews. It’s my privilege to know many of the key Microsoft executives and product designers and have insight into both where the products are now and their future direction. So colleagues & clients have asked me to start this blog to share some of the insight that both this knowledge (obviously where not restricted by NDA’s or client confidentiality) and experience can help. Specifically I want to concentrate not on the specifics of how (there are some great blogs already for that) but why. If any user helps their business make better decisions or consultant can give better advice then that will be objective achieved. I founded Technology Management in 1992 and have led from the front ever since. Helping clients use technology to grow their business is my passion through explaining technology in terms that everyone can understand. My interest in computing began at the age of eight, long before my school had the equipment to cope. Throughout school and university I developed software commercially. I hold many IT certifications, such as Microsoft Dynamics NAV (for over 17 years), Microsoft Dynamics CRM (for over 10 years), as well as Microsoft Windows Server, Exchange and SQL. In October 2015, I was awarded the title of Most Valuable Professional (MVP), a title given to a select few individuals (31 currently) across the world specifically for Dynamics NAV. After years of working with a range of distribution and manufacturing software for hundreds of organisations, I focus on understanding the business requirements of an organisation, what it will take to deliver the systems required to maximise their potential. Follow me online via my other social channels: - Twitter: @jamescrowter - LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jamescrowter Or email me directly at james[.]crowter[@]tecman.co.uk.

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