Simplifying material flows
It is often the case that there are simply too many material and goods flows, or that supporting them in a business information system would fragment the business too much.
Typical examples are, for example, a transfer to commission or a sale out of commission:
To support this material and goods flow, six types of open documents would be validated:
| Doc. Type |
Name |
Issuing warehouse |
Receiving warehouse |
| 2100 |
Transfer from the Main Warehouse to the Commission 1 |
Main warehouse |
Commission 1 |
| 2200 |
Transfer from Commission 1 to Main Warehouse |
Commission 1 |
Main warehouse |
| 2300 |
Transfer from the Main Warehouse to the Commission 2 |
Main warehouse |
Commission 2 |
| 2400 |
Transfer from Commission 2 to Main Warehouse |
Commission 2 |
Main warehouse |
| 3100 |
Sales from Commission 1 |
Commission 1 |
|
| 3200 |
Sales from the Commission 2 |
Commission 2 |
|
In these cases, we resort to simplification of material and commodity flows:
In this case, only three other document types are open:
| Doc. Type |
Name |
Issuing warehouse |
Receiving warehouse |
| 2100 |
Transfer from the Main Warehouse to the Commission |
Main warehouse |
|
| 2200 |
Transfer from the Commission to the Main Warehouse |
|
Main warehouse |
| 3200 |
Sales from the Commission |
|
|
We can see that for transfers there are no commission warehouses defined and for sales there is no issuing warehouse defined.
A blank field means that the repository can be entered when creating the document.
We will therefore select the appropriate consignment warehouse at the time of the transfer, as well as at the time of the sale out of consignment. In the same way, we can simplify the sale or purchase itself.
 |
Despite the advantages of defining document types in this way, caution is needed as we may inadvertently transfer or sell idents from the wrong repository. As a rule of thumb, only define events in this way when there are too many for normal work. |