Need advice for complex warehouse planning
I am trying to figure out if there is a way within Visual to simplify one our complex warehouse planning issues.
We have warehouse "A". This is a main warehouse that handles most of our distributions and maintains most of our physical inventory for all of our products (thousands of SKU's). This warehouse typically supplies various selling outlets and sub distribution units.
Within warehouse "A", we have a much smaller warehouse "B". Warehouse "B" gets its inventory directly from warehouse "A". Warehouse "B" supplies orders directly to the consumer, from online sales, for about 200 SKU's.
Then we have warehouse "C", which is a third party warehouse that sells 46 of the same SKU's as warehouse "B". Warehouse "C" also receives its inventory from warehouse "A".
The sales are reported by product, not by where it's sold, so we have one forecast. Also, we receive separate inventory reports from each of these warehouses, which are imported into Visual on a weekly basis. So we have on hand totals at each warehouse, but one forecast.
Currently we are using warehouse "B" as the master scheduled warehouse, because this is the main point of sale for these products so we need to be certain it has enough inventory. When I look at a product in the material planning window, the suggested MRP release does not take into account what is on hand at warehouse "A".
For example, we have WidgetQ. At warehouse "A", we have 50,000 on hand. At warehouse "B", we have 2,000 on hand, and at warehouse "C" we have 7,000 on hand.
Our Forecast indicates that we're going to sell 25,000 in the next 6 months. In the Material Planning Window, we have a suggested MRP release of 23,000. However, we know that we don't need to actually build 23,000 WidgetQ's, because there are plenty on hand at warehouse "A". We know we need to move inventory from warehouse "A" to warehouse "B", but not build new product.
Any suggestions on how we can use the Material Planning Window to take into account the entire on hand inventory, regardless of warehouse, to let us know what we actually need to build? Any other suggestions?
