Warehouse management only mode overview
Warehouse management only mode lets you set up a legal entity in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management that's dedicated to warehouse management processes. This legal entity can then provide warehousing services to other legal entities in Supply Chain Management. Alternatively, it can provide warehousing services to external enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems or order management systems. There are two basic scenarios:
- Integrate Warehouse management only mode with an external ERP system – Take advantage of the core warehouse management (WMS) functionality that Supply Chain Management offers while you also continue to take advantage of your existing investments in third-party ERP and order management systems. Regardless of the ERP or ordering systems that you have in place, you can now quickly deploy our advanced WMS functionality without having to set up or maintain areas of Supply Chain Management that you don't need. You're then ready to benefit from advanced WMS features such as automation integration, carrier integration, and the Warehouse Management mobile app.
- Set up an external shared warehouse for other legal entities in Supply Chain Management – If you use an external shared warehouse, logistic operations run in a separate legal entity. This legal entity shares warehousing services with other legal entities that manage all the order and financial processing.
Warehouse management only mode uses lightweight source documents that are dedicated to inbound and outbound shipment orders. Because these documents focus exclusively on warehouse management, they can replace multiple types of more general-purpose documents (such as sales orders, purchase orders, and transfer orders) from a pure warehouse management perspective.
Deployment options
Warehouse management only mode provides several deployment options to support the business needs of running your warehouse management processes.
You can start a free trial of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management via the unified admin experience for finance and operations apps. You can then try out an implementation as shown in the following high-level diagram of the elements and processes of an integrated system. Learn more in this example that shows how to use inbound and outbound shipment orders.
The solution is very flexible. Therefore, you can choose the configuration of features and systems that best fits your business needs. The following subsections provide a few examples that show how you can integrate Supply Chain Management warehouse management mode.
Handle all orders and financial processing in an external system
The following high-level diagram shows an example where Supply Chain Management is used to handle warehouse operations only. An external system is used to handle all orders and financial processing.
For this type of implementation, you must configure the warehouse management processes as part of Supply Chain Management. For a more detailed description of this process and the related processes, see Warehouse management only mode with external ERP system.
Use a separate legal entity to manage warehouse management processes for other legal entities in Supply Chain Management
The following high-level diagram shows an example where a system uses a separate Supply Chain Management legal entity to manage warehouse management processes for other legal entities. As part of this management, it tracks the ownership of shared items by using an owner inventory dimension.
For a more detailed description of this process and the related processes, see Warehouse management only mode with external shared warehouse.
Handle logistic warehouse processes for both internal and external integrations
The following high-level diagram shows an example where a system uses Supply Chain Management to handle warehousing, plus a wider range of processes (such as sales, purchase, and production orders). At the same time, it also uses Supply Chain Management to handle warehouse operations for other ERP and order processing systems.
For this type of implementation, the same warehouse instance can handle all the logistic warehouse processes for both internal and external integrations.
Unsupported processes
The following high-level processes aren't supported out of the box when Warehouse management only mode is processed. The list is most relevant to existing customers who already run warehouse management processes and are considering adopting the Warehouse management only mode functionality.
| Process | Description |
|---|---|
| Inbound Warehouse Management mobile app flows | The Warehouse Management mobile app flows for inbound shipment orders don't support:
|
| Production flows | Inbound and outbound shipment orders don't support production order, batch order, or kanban processing, including material consumption and reporting as finished via the Warehouse Management mobile app. In addition, you can't use cross-docking from production orders to outbound docks in combination with inbound and outbound shipment orders. |
| Transportation management processes | The transportation management engines that are currently supported for purchase order loads aren't supported for the inbound shipment order processes. Note that charges can't be assigned, and direct invoicing can't be processed, for either inbound shipment orders or outbound shipment orders. Therefore, the apportionment weight engine can't be used to generate freight bills. |
| Creation of orders from the warehouse app | The process of creating outbound shipment orders from the Warehouse Management mobile app isn't supported. (That process resembles the Create transfer order from license plates process for mobile devices.) |
| Internal order processing information that's provided to external systems | When you're using the supported orders in Supply Chain Management (such as transfer, sales, purchase, and production orders), all the related business process data is automatically maintained in Supply Chain Management. However, no business events or related inbound and outbound on-hand information is provided to external systems for these types of processes. For example, if you create a transfer order, ship inventory out of one warehouse, and receive it in another warehouse in Supply Chain Management, you can't use the method that's described for inbound and outbound shipment orders to inform the external systems about the operations. You must instead use a different method, such as Warehouse inventory update logs. |
| Order-committed reservations as part of the allow reservation on demand order capability | Outbound shipment order line transaction reservations don't support reservations on inventory dimensions below the location in the reservation hierarchy. (However, these reservations are supported for Sales order line transactions.) |
| Items enabled for catch weight processing | Items that are enabled for catch weight processing aren't supported for inbound or outbound shipping orders. |
| Policies and processes around vendor or customer accounts | Representations of vendors and customers aren't used for inbound or outbound shipping orders. Therefore, you can't use related order processing policies with this type of setup. For example, you can't use customer-specific or vendor-specific product filters or nonconformance management. |
| Order line registration and pick update processing | Inbound and outbound shipment order lines don't support the manual registration and un-registration processes that are supported by other types of order lines (such as purchase, sales, and transfer order lines). |