Direct Material Supply

Direct material supply concept implies that goods received from suppliers or produced in manufacturing shops move directly to their point of consumption without storing it in a ‘storage’ warehouse. The DMS concept uses the Cross-docking concept to avoid storage of goods in the warehouse, and the Warehouse Transfer Order concept to move the goods directly to the point of consumption, which is probably another warehouse.

Warehouse Supply Structures are defined for direct material supply, a user-specific cluster of warehouses, which consists of one or more supply warehouses and a number of destination warehouses. Before using direct material supply, at least one warehouse supply structure must be defined.

If you use direct material supply (DMS), you can define planning priority rules for cross-docking. These rules specify conditions that can be applied to a specific situation and a specific order, and result in a priority figure when applied to a specific order. Aggregating the priority figures of all applicable priority rules results in a planning priority, which in turn is used as the system priority.

The Direct material supply (DMS) orders require proper planning to ship the goods directly to the customer from the supplier instead of supplier's own warehouse. The received goods are either cross-docked to the customer if urgently required, or putaway temporarily. LN supports three methods of DMS planning: