Solving the Supply Chain/Consignment System Question with Microsoft Dynamics GP

One of our existing customers, a manufacturer and distributor of pre-paid calling cards sold through various retail outlets, came to us recently with a new business requirement that would allow their current Dynamics GP solution to communicate with a cloud-database connected to the various retail outlets.  This would allow our client to use their existing Dynamics GP installation as a consignment inventory solution.  So we set out to engineer a solution to work around this wrinkle in the normal supply chain model and learned a few things along the way.

Among the many factors that had to be considered was not only working with one of our 3^rd-party partners as we built the enhancement but also molding this enhancement around the workings of our clients 3^rd-party partners, such as a fulfillment center in the Midwest (our client is based in the northeast) and the cloud database (or switch) provider, neither of which was playing a role in the development of the solution.  Also, the fact that the consignment process involved has products shipping and being stocked on shelves but no revenue realized and accounted for due to complex revenue recognition requirements.  Additionally, each card sold would generate an invoice and the client needed to aggregate the individual invoices into umbrella invoices for their retail partners generated on a 15 day cycle.

Our approach to this was to produce a solution that would accept a variety of documents into the existing GP solution in a quasi- EDI fashion (purchase orders, requisitions, custom shipping notifications, invoices, etc) that originated from the fulfillment house.  Another necessary piece was to have the existing solution interacting with the cloud database, where the individual card registration information was stored,  to get activation information for each card so that an invoice was generated for each specific sale of a card and would be included in the aggregated invoices.

Pulling together various elements from the third party partners of both the client and one of our own third party partner, SalesPad, we were able to utilize the flexibility and highly customizable nature of Dynamics GP, SQL Server, SQL Server Integration Services, eConnect and .Net code, allowing us to deliver to our customer a solution that satisfied all of their needs, increased their efficiency and helped to keep operating costs to a minimum.

by Micro Force - Long Island, New York Microsoft Dynamics GP Partner