Receipt-to-Stock/Inspection

Hello Group,
We have an interesting business situation. We are the American subsidiary of a 
Danish manufacturing company and we procure 99% of our components from our 
parent company. Our parent company sends us invoices as soon as the components 
are shipped from Denmark and based on the agreement between the parent company 
and the subsidiary, all invoices get paid even before the components arrive at 
the American warehouses.

To facilitate invoice processing in MAPICS, we have been doing a 
receipt-to-dock process upon receiving invoices from our parent company. This 
ensures that invoices get processed and at the same time the components are not 
in stock. However, our Finance department is not comfortable with this entire 
process because at any given point in time, we have a huge amount of inventory 
on our books, but we don't have those components in our MAPICS warehouses. All 
our warehouses are controlled warehouses.

The challenge that we are faced with is to design a process which will help us 
get away from our current process. I have two thoughts on my mind:

Option 1: Set up a transit warehouse with a unique location for each of our 
warehouses. So every time we get an invoice, we can perform a receipt-to-stock 
into a location (unique to the warehouse the components are being shipped to). 
As soon as the warehouses physically receive the components, they can do an 
inter-warehouse transfer to move the items from the transit warehouse into 
their warehouse.

Option 2: Set up a quality control process where the components are received 
(RI transaction) into the actual stocking warehouses and flagged to go through 
a quality control process. Upon physically receiving the components, the 
warehouse can perform quality control transactions (PQ) to approve the items 
and make them available for consumption. 

>From an inventory and procurement viewpoint, Option 2 is going to work better 
>as item availability at the item-warehouse level gives us an overview of 
>what's on-hand, on-order, allocated for a given warehouse and we don't have to 
>take into consideration what is in another warehouse (transit). I would like 
>to know about some important inventory/procurement/financial implications of 
>Option 1 and Option 3. I would also like to get other ideas using which an 
>appropriate solution can be implemented.

Look forward to your responses.

Thanks,
Nandu
Nandagopal Padmanabhan 
Data Analyst | Vestas-AWT