Sage 100

2014 Premium. User buys 10 units of widgets. Five units are designated for customer Walgreens and five units are for customer RR Donnelley. The end user wants to: 1. Print an inventory valuation report and see how many units are in inventory for each customer. 2. When a customer purchases a widget, automatically decrease the designated inventory. Example: If Walgreens buys 3 widgets, then only 2 Walgreens widgets would then display on the inventory valuation report. I thought about lot valuation but they don't want to have to manually distribute each line.

separate warehouses comes to mind, but I'm guessing you already thought of that. I'm looking at a similar situation where a customer wants to pull stuff off the shelf and reserve it for the customer and hold it until the rest of the items that are backordered on the same order is received in from vendors. the ACSG Multi-bin with Pallet Tracking is supposed to handle that straight up, we are in early stages of looking at it so I have not fully vetted that yet.

The separate warehouses work except they have a lot of customers that need this feature. The issue is relying on the purchasing staff to choose the correct warehouse. It would be great if we could link a warehouse to a customer. We could then have a UDF or other field in PO entry to enter a customer and automatically populate the correct warehouse.

Like an encumbered inventory, right?

Yes encumbered with efficient data processing.

ACSG multi bin does that And I think with out the Pallet Tracking if you don't need that part.

Couldn't you do this with Master SOs and a Crystal Report?

@MichaelNottoli Please elaborate how this would work. Thanks.

Lots with the customer name as the lot number?

I proposed that to the client Phil. It seems like the best way to do this off the shelf without mods. He didn't like the process of manually distributing the items during shipping data entry. So I am trying to think of another method.

Can't lots be assigned at sales order creation now?

If each ""encumbrance"" is on a Master Sales Order, and each release of ""encumbered"" inventory is a SO from that Master, then the Master can manage the balance. It should a straightforward Crystal report to look at Master SOs and IM_Whse.

To take @PhilMcIntosh's idea one step further, you could script the Lot Code assignment in the Sales Order.

That is a great idea. We would just need to agree on a lot number naming convention. The script could pick the lot based on a relationship between the customer number and the lot number.

A customer UDF to assign the lot number?

Use a UDT with customer number and lot number if the customer number itself won't suffice

Terrific ideas. Thank you everyone for the advice. The UDF and/or UDT would prevent data entry errors. They already enter a sales order number on the PO header. We could use a script during PO receipts to assign a lot number, and a script during shipping and SO invoice entry to auto distribute the items.

This is needed for maybe 20 big customers. It doesn't make sense to change every inventory item to lot valuation for these 20 customers. There would be too much overhead incurred processing the other 10K customer. Damn. Maybe they will go for the separate warehouse concept.