Manufacturing and Supply Chain Materials Management

You must complete setups in Manufacturing and Supply Chain Materials Management, including organizations and subinventories for reverse logistics and your repair and parts supply chain.

The reverse logistics and parts supply chains include geographies, zones, locations, carriers, transit times, shipping networks and replenishment rules.

Use the following guidelines to set up your master organizations, inventory organizations, maintenance organizations, default inventory organization, interorganization parameters, subinventories, stocking locations, locators, geographies, zones, internal locations, carriers, transit times, inventory replenishment rules, and shipping parameters for reverse logistics and your repair and parts supply chain.

Item Master Organizations: Use the Manage Inventory Organizations page to set up master and reference organizations so that you can define part and product item numbers and attributes, such as UOM, weight and so on.
Inventory Organizations: Use the Manage Inventory Organizations page to create inventory organizations for the warehouses and stocking locations in your parts and reverse logistics supply chains. You'll typically set up an inventory organization for each physical stocking location including warehouses, storage lockers, field offices and returns warehouses and repair depots. You'll also need to set up inventory organizations for your field service technician trunk stocks locations, typically by region or district, for example, Los Angeles Tech Trunk Stock.
Maintenance Organizations: Use the Manage Inventory Organizations page to create maintenance organizations for each repair depot and for capturing field service costs. Select the Organization Performs Maintenance Activities check box. The field service cost organization is captured on the Manage Charges and Estimates page.
Default Inventory Organization Profile (INV_DEFAULT_ORG_ID): Use the Manage Service Logistics Profile Options page to define this profile, which defaults and filters the Item LOVs. You'll typically set this option to an item master organization but you can set it to other organizations to restrict a user's access to certain items.
Interorganization Parameters: Use the Manage Interorganization Parameters page to enable parts and products to be shipped between the inventory organizations in your parts and reverse logistics supply chains. You must set it up for any organization that will ship material to a parts supply chain organization and the organizations that will receive parts from the field service organization for return or repair.
Subinventories: Use the Manage Subinventories page to create subinventories for your parts and reverse logistics supply chain inventory organizations. These subinventories must also get set up in the Service Logistics Manage Stocking Locations page where they get classified as usable and defective, manned, unmanned, site-dedicated, or technician. You'll typically create at least one usable and one defective subinventory in each inventory organization. You must also set up a usable and defective subinventory for each field technician trunk stock.
Intersubinventory Parameters: Use the Manage Intersubinventory Parameters page to create transfer orders from subinventories. You must define the organization, the destination type, the destination subinventory, the source subinventory, and the inventory destination transfer type. For the inventory destination transfer type, use the direct type if you want the transfer order to be automatically received into the field technician subinventory or use the transit inventory destination transfer type if want the technician to receive the transfer order and complete the debrief process.
Stocking Locations: Use the Manage Stocking Locations page to add stocking locations (subinventories) to the parts supply chain by assigning the stocking location type (technician, site-dedicated, manned, and unmanned) and condition (usable or defective) to the parts and reverse logistics supply chains.
Locators: Use the Create Subinventories, Manage Items and Manage Inventory Organization Parameters pages to set up locators for items and subinventories if a stocking location requires locator-level inventory tracking. Service Logistics supports locator-level inventory tracking and transactions including parts debrief, transfers and returns.
Geographies: Use the Manage Geographies page to set up geographies to define your shipping and returns zones. Complete the following steps:
1. After defining the geography hierarchy, specify the geography validations for the country. The geography hierarchy is your geography master, typically bought from a third party provider. You must set up geography validation for those geography elements that you plan to use. For example, if you've set up zones by state, make sure that geography validation is set up for the State geography type.
2. After you set up all the components of your geographies (geography structure, geography hierarchy, and geography validation), run the Validate Geographies of Addresses Against Master Geographies ESS job with the values:
  - Location Table Name = HZ_LOCATIONS
  - Run Type = ALL
  - Usage Code = GEOGRAPHY
  This ESS job creates a mapping between the addresses and the geography hierarchy or master. This mapping is used by the parts search program to find the geographies and hence the zones, where the ship-to address resides.
Zones: Use the Manage Shipping Zones page to set up zones for parts sourcing transit times and for return routing rules. Parts search, parts sourcing and return routing use the customer address to identify the zone.
Internal Locations: Use the Manage Locations page to create internal locations. You must set up internal locations and assign them to all the stocking locations (inventory organizations and subinventories) in your parts and reverse logistics supply chains. Internal locations are used when you're shipping and returning parts to a stocking location and when you're calculating arrival times while sourcing parts. Use the Manage Subinventories page to assign internal locations to subinventories. Use the Manage Inventory Organizations page to assign internal locations to inventory organizations.
Carriers: Use the Manage Carriers page to create carriers and their ship methods and then assign the ship methods to source inventory organizations for use.
Transit Times: Use the Manage Transit Times page to set up transit times by mapping origin internal locations to destination zones along with the available ship methods and their transit times (days).

The parts search program looks for parts at internal locations mapped to the ship-to address destination zones. Internal locations are internal addresses (HR_Location) assigned to inventory stocking locations (inventory organizations or subinventories). You must define which zones each of your manned, unmanned, and technician stocking location can supply.
Note: The Manage Transit Times page supports many other types of origins and destinations that aren't available in the parts search program.

For each source or origin location that can supply a destination zone, you must also set up at least one shipping method in the Shipping Methods section of the Manage Transit Times page. Transit times can be defined as a fraction of a day for shipping methods like courier and pickup that are time-based (less than a day).
Inventory Replenishment Rules: Use the Manage Subinventories page, Manage Item Subinventories page, Manage Items page, Manage Inventory Organizations page to set up inventory replenishment rules. In the Parts Search window, when you select the Inventory Source option, you're selecting the rules that identify the source inventory for your parts search. Inventory replenishment rules are used in automatic parts search. Inventory replenishment rules are also used to create transfer orders for field service parts when the required items are unavailable (backorders).
Shipping Parameters: Use the Manage Shipping Parameters page to decide whether a default shipping method is required to create a transfer order by selecting the Enforce Shipping Method check box. Shipping methods are defined when transit times are defined. We recommend that you don't select the Enforce Shipping Method check box. If you select it, you must set up transit times between all your source and destination organizations to successfully create transfer orders.

For details on how to set up these attributes, see the Implementing Manufacturing and Supply Chain Materials Management guide.