If you are managing multiple locations in NetSuite, you must appreciate the ease of managing various inventory-related processes, from setting location-specific replenishment preferences to generating reports on your inventory value and availability. If you occasionally special order or drop ship products for your customers, you are also familiar with the streamlined process NetSuite has in place to make that happen. At the same time, you might be wondering why a similar solution is not available when a transfer order is needed to meet a specific customer’s demand.
There are good reasons for this situation – and powerful solutions available within NetSuite – but the truth is, there is no Special Transfer Order button next to the Special Order and Drop Ship buttons on your unfulfilled transaction lines. While the latter two types of special transactions rely on criteria that are almost universally easy to define, such as preferred vendor, a Special Transfer Order might require more hands-on review and decision making. Where does your organization have excess inventory? Which locations are close to each other? These are some of the considerations with answers unique to each organization’s internal logic.
The experience
While these requirements do not mean that tedious and unreliable Special Transfer Order processes are unavoidable, that is often the experience of organizations if no time and effort is spent on configuring NetSuite to support unique business logic. The following issues are common:
- Manual transfer order entry.
- Communications about transfer orders managed outside of NetSuite.
- Elusive links between sales orders and transfer orders.
- Lack of automated commitments/allocations between sales orders and linked transfer orders. This last issue is perhaps the most problematic because it means that once a transfer order is received at the destination location, someone might inadvertently commit and fulfill the items to a different customer than they were intended for.
An elegant solution
SuiteFlow, NetSuite’s powerful no-code workflow builder, provides easy tools to develop a basic process flow to streamline Special Transfer Order creation. At its core, the configuration will include the three elements listed below, but custom logic can be easily incorporated to meet your unique business needs.
Ability to create transfer orders directly from sales orders
To easily create transfer orders and link them to sales, you can leverage a two-state workflow applied to sales orders, like the one shown above. In the first state, you are viewing a sales order, and a button appears on the top of your screen to Create a Special Transfer Order.
As soon as you click on it, you move to the second state, where a Transfer Order form opens, with some fields pre-populated, including the destination location for the transferred goods and the Source Sales Order linked to the Special Transfer Order.
All that’s left for your team to do now is to enter the From Location (based on your unique business logic) and the items to be transferred.
Set up reserved inventory locations
If you transfer inventory to the same location from which you are fulfilling your regular inventory orders, you will expose the inventory to all these other orders. As a result, someone else might inadvertently commit and sell the unit to another customer before you have a chance to get it to the one for whom you intended it. A simple solution involves creating a reservation sublocation – for example, if you have a St. Louis location, from which you are making regular inventory sales, you would create a secondary St. Louis (Reserved) sublocation just to handle those order lines for which you are creating a Special Transfer Orders. If you are using bins or full WMS solution, you may need to configure one or many bins within that location, depending on your volume of Special Transfer Orders.
Note that to make this possible, you need to assign locations on sales orders on the line level in addition to the header level. The line-level location field in sales can be easily enabled via form customization.
Internal communications and triggers
You can configure a variety of internal communication automations and reminders to suit your business process. These may include:
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- A dashboard reminder for transfer orders to be fulfilled at the source location.
- Similarly, a reminder for transfer orders to receive at destination location, including the reservation sublocation in filters.
- A message on the packing slip to help your warehouse team verify that they are receiving to the correct location.
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- An email notification to the sales rep once a Special Transfer Order related to their sales is received.
Enhancements for your business logic
The reason we are talking about a custom process in the first place is that Special Transfer Order management may vary widely depending on specific business needs. In that same vein, it is worth highlighting ways the process can be further customized in high-volume of heavily structured environments.
- A User Event script can be leveraged to create a transfer order fully automatically for lines with a reservation location selected as soon as a sales order is saved. While this solution will involve a heavier investment upfront, it may be worthwhile for companies with a high volume of transfer orders or more order lines than is reasonable for a human to enter manually.
- Scripted inventory allocation so that instead of going to a special reservation location, inventory on a transfer order is firmly allocated to a particular sales order. Again, while this solution involves a more complex setup upfront, but may be the right choice if your organization frequently has multiple concurrent Special Transfer Orders for the same item.
- Location relationships can be set up through a couple of custom fields so that the system defaults to particular reservation or source locations if your business process involves a high level of consistency.
Workflows in NetSuite are a powerful tool reflective of the system’s deeper principles: they allow for flexibility with handling of highly variable processes like Special Transfer Orders without the cost, time, and technical requirements of scripting. Companies transferring inventory for specific orders might face some common issues, but the solution is right in front of us if we leverage workflow-driven automated communications, buttons to create linked transactions, and reservation locations. Then, heavier customizations and scripts can be leveraged to enhance the solution only to the extent if there are unique requirements.
With multiple locations and inventory, a combination of special orders, special transfer orders and reserved inventory locations can be used, and Meridian Business is ready to assist. If you have questions or would like additional information, please reach out to your Meridian contact or email Meridian at mpower@meridianbusiness.com.
