Outsourcing and Offshoring with Dynamics NAV
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008It’s no secret that western Supply Chain companies have been Outsourcing and Offshoring (to make things simple, we will just call it “Outsourcing”) more and more production (among other things) in the past decade. In the last few releases, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, formerly Navision, have created some very strong features and functions which can assist companies in tracking and costing goods correctly in a Outsourcing scenario.
The first is the Item Availability screens, with either P/O’s with proper receipt dates (if purchasing from overseas), and Transfer Orders (if making yourself overseas). From any screen where you need item information (exceptionally helpful from a Sales Quote or Order, where you want to see if you can fulfill that order) you can see the dates from now into the future, with quantities on Purchase Order, Transfer Orders, Production Orders, etc., either by your location, or overall in the company. That way, if you don’t have the item on hand now, you can see when you will get it in.
Click on the thumbnail below to see the Item Availability screen as navigated to directly from a Sales Order.
The other feature which has really made an impact for our customers are the Item Charges to calculate a correct Landed Cost. This is handy when costs come in later, most commonly freight and import / export duties, which should be calculated as part of the Item’s cost. As you can see in the below example, we can take a charge and allocate it to items in our inventory when the invoice comes in. Dynamics NAV lets us do it equally or by Amount, but we have extended this to also allocate by Quantity or Weight.
These features, combined with the multi-language and multi-currency functionality, help give us a great solution set for our customers who outsource from other countries.
