Third-party logistics (3PL)

The Distribution SX.e Third-party Logistics (3PL) feature enables you to set up and maintain a warehouse for a specific customer, and also access an alternate warehouse. When 3PL is implemented, when there is insufficient stock in the customer's warehouse, you can automatically split order lines in order to fill customer orders from the alternate warehouse inventory.

With 3PL, your customer’s warehouse is the selling warehouse, and it physically resides somewhere inside your distribution warehouse. You distribution warehouse is the alternate warehouse. Your distribution warehouse must be set up as the Authorized Replenishment Path (ARP) for your customer’s warehouse.

The price and cost of items in your customer’s warehouse are zero, because the customer has already purchased them. For auditing purposes, you can maintain a replacement, standard, or last cost. You can also run the Transfer Customer Inventory Value Report at any time to review the current value of customer-owned inventory.

A customer warehouse is designated as such by assigning a customer and, optionally, a shipto number to the Product Warehouse Description Setup record. The 3PL functionality is a process controlled primarily by these settings:

• The selling warehouse must be customer-specific. That is, a customer number, and, optionally, a shipto, must be assigned to the Product Warehouse Description Setup-General record.
• To set your distribution warehouse as the ARP for the customer warehouse, in the customer warehouse Product Warehouse Description Setup record, in the Extended tab, in the Authorized Replenishment Path section, in Type, select Warehouse. In the Warehouse field, select the distribution warehouse.
• In Product Warehouse Description Setup-Other, the Pull Available Stock From option for the customer warehouse must be set to Customer Owned First or Alternate Warehouse First.
• The warehouse customer number must match the sales order’s customer number.
• An alternate warehouse cross-reference is set up for the customer warehouse in Product Extended Warehouse Cross Reference Setup.

Although not required to activate 3PL, you must also select View Alternate Warehouse Levels If Stockout in SA Administration Options-Documents-Sales Orders-Entry Settings. This option enables you to assign alternate warehouse stock to a specific line in Sales Order Entry during the manual assignment of the stock to a line.

In addition to the distribution warehouse, you can set up an unlimited number of alternate warehouses. If multiple alternate warehouse locations are set up, any alternate warehouse can be used during the SX.api automatic line split and order creation process. The surplus and net available quantities are checked by the logic within each warehouse to select one single warehouse to fill the line based on this hierarchy:

1. The alternate warehouse with the greatest surplus where surplus can fully fill the remaining quantity.
2. The alternate warehouse with the highest net available and surplus that can fill the remaining quantity fully.
3. The alternate warehouse with the highest net available balance that can fully fill the remaining quantity.

Lines are not split again among alternate warehouses.