Project-Specific Customer Returns

With project-driven supply chain, you can receive project-specific customer returns into project-specific inventory. This enables you to return project-specific material directly to your organization and ensures that the correct charges are credited back to your projects upon return of goods.

You must first enable Inventory Tracking by Project for your applicable organizations and set up your default expenditure types.

The high-level process flow includes:

1. Ship project-specific material to your customer

2. Return sales order with project and task details

3. Receive the goods back into project-specific inventory

4. Credit costs to the appropriate project

Let's look at these areas of project-specific customer returns:

• Project details and inventory attributes

• On-hand inventory

• Shipments

• Completed transactions

• Transfer transactions

• Cost accounting review

• Managing project-specific customer returns in Projects

Project Details and Inventory Attributes

You can view the project details and inventory attributes for project-specific customer returns on several Receiving pages. The Project Details section shows the project and task from the Return Material Authorization (RMA) order. The Inventory Attributes section shows the project and task by which the on-hand quantity for the item is tracked.

When you enable an organization for inventory tracking by project, then the project and task under the Project Details and Inventory Attributes sections are the same. This set of project and task information displays on these Receiving pages:

• Receipt Lines and Receipt Line pages

• Inspect Lines and Inspect Line pages

• Put Away Lines and Put Away Line pages

You can also view the project and task for the source document during corrections and returns.

On-Hand Inventory

After performing the put away transaction, the on-hand inventory is tracked by project and task. The Transfer Inventory Transactions to Costing process gets project costing attributes from the RMA and interfaces them to costing.

• For referenced RMA orders, the cost of the RMA is derived from the original sales order.

• For unreferenced RMA orders, the actual cost of the received material carries forward into on-hand inventory for the actual and average costed organizations. For standard costed organizations, the predefined standard cost is used to value the on-hand inventory.

Shipments

When the organization in which the RMA is received is enabled for the Print shipping documents for return material authorizations option, a shipment is created for the RMA. The shipment has a reference to the project and task for a project-based RMA order.

The inventory project and task that appear on the shipment depend on whether or not the organization is enabled for the Inventory Tracking by Project option:

• When the shipment is created for an organization that's enabled for inventory tracking by project, the inventory project and task on the shipment is the same as the project and task on the RMA order.

• When the shipment is created for an organization that's not enabled for inventory tracking by project, the inventory project and task are blank.

You can view the inventory tracking details and project and task details on the Manage Shipment Lines page.

Completed Transactions

You can use the Review Completed Transactions page in Inventory Management to view the project costing and inventory tracking details for the RMA receipt transaction created for a project-based RMA order.

When the organization is enabled for inventory tracking by project, the inventory project and task for an RMA receipt transaction is the same as the project costing project and task on the RMA order. If the organization isn't enabled for inventory tracking by project, the inventory project and task are blank, while the project costing project and task number refer to the project and task from the RMA order.

Transfer Transactions from Inventory to Costing

Use the Transfer Transactions from Inventory to Costing process to cost project-based put away transactions for RMA orders. This process sends the project, task, expenditure type, expenditure date, expenditure organization, and other user-defined project costing attributes from RMAs to Costing Accounting. For referenced returns, the process uses the shipped date on the original sales order as the expenditure date for the material transactions.

Cost Accounting costs the inventory transactions. Once costed, you can review the cost accounting entries.

Cost Accounting Review

Use the Review Cost Accounting Distributions task to review the cost accounting information for the project-based sales order return transactions. These return transactions can be referenced or unreferenced to the original sales order.

Managing Project-Specific Sales Order Customer Returns in Projects

You can import referenced intercompany transactions using the Import Cost process. Depending on the source transaction, the process creates one or more of these document entries for a sales order Project Portfolio Management:

• Item cost

• Item overhead

Use the Manage Project Costs task in the Costs work area in Project Portfolio Management to search and view expenditure items and project costing details associated to the returned sales order.