Recommended settings for materials that acts as consumables in production

The core team has been engaged in a couple of requests about how to set up raw materials that acts as consumables in production. In these requests the following characteristics has been used for consumables:

• They are never stored in the raw material warehouse, but filled up directly at the production locations, therefore warehouse work for raw material picking is not needed for these materials.
• They often represent a low value and are not accounted for at time of consumption, but cycle counted at a periodic basis.
• They are often set up to allow for physical negative inventory to avoid blocking issues when they are back-flushed in production.

Here is how this scenario is enabled with and without enablement for the new warehouse processes

For products enabled for the advanced warehouse processes

• The product must be set up with an Item model group that allows for physical negative inventory
• Field Allow pick work center negative on the released products detailed page must be enabled
• Field Allow negative inventory on the location directive for raw material picking must be enabled
• The product must be set up in production to be consumed from a warehouse that allows for physical negative inventory
• The product will be picked from the product input location defined by the resource used from the route operation that consumes the material.

For products that are not enabled for the new warehouse processes

• Setup a default issue location either at the item-warehouse level or by the resource (resource consumption). This location will be defaulted to the production bill of material line, and act as the production input location i.e. the material will be consumed from this location.
• Use it in a warehouse that is WMS-enabled, and there is no problem setting up this product to allow for negative inventory.