What exactly does an order line being closed, prevent from happening?
I assume the following (as I’ve not come across any times when the following wasn’t true)
Closing and open lines:
Removes remaining allocations/demand
Prevents creating a job for Make to Order
Prevents creating a BTO PO line
Prevents creating a Customer Shipment against the order line
Prevents changes to Order line (all order line fields become Read Only)
Does NOT prevent misc invoicing against the order
What else?
Why I need to know …
We often have line items on orders for non-tangible items (services like startup, documentation, proj management, and even shipping). Since these never get shipped, the lines on the order stay open. This is messing up our attempts to start using PO suggestions as all these lines generate suggestions.
I’m trying to convince Order Processing that they need to close these orders, even if billing isn’t complete.
A workaround for this is to create non-quantity bearing part numbers, or use on the fly part numbers with units that make sense (like hours or simply dollars) to give you something to “ship”. You would have to make sure the GL’s are set up the way you want if the cost isn’t coming from inventory, but there should be no reason you can’t ship non-physical things. I think that shipping transaction is what transfers the dollars and triggers the recognition of the revenue. So there might be some accounting reasons that you would want to ship the lines, even for non-physical things.
Another option would be to use Misc Header or Line Charges instead of Lines.
Or for Project Management use Project Billing.
For some reason, most prefer to use actual order lines for Misc Charge items, which I’ve not been able to understand.
Almost forgot. Providing that financially, everything is ok with these lines. You could use a BPM or a nightly scheduled PowerShell DMT load to close the lines. I would imagine The BPM BAQ or DMT BAQ would need to evaluate the entire order to make sure all tangible lines are closed and then select the non-tangible lines.
Making packers for services isn’t an issue. It’s just something that doesn’t happen. These “items” have no COS, so the shipping part of accounting wouldn’t do anything.
During Invoice Entry, (which has to be a Misc Invoice since no shipment exists) the Prod Group is selected to drive the sales/revenue to the proper GL Acct.
Right now, the Proj Manager(PM) updates Accounting with when billable events occur. Since most of the non-tangible “items” on orders are place holders, and the units and cost on the line aren’t carved in stone, the amount that needs to be billed needs to come from the PM, and could not use info from a Packer created for these non-tangible items.
So having the PM direct Shipping to make a packer, is “just extra work” for the PM, as they’s have to contact accounting anyways.
If your main concern is that these unshipped lines are creating PO Suggestions, uncheck the boxes in Part Maintenance called “Generate PO Suggestions” and “Process MRP”.
Many of these lines use On The Fly PN’s so no Part Master entry exists.
And it’s not uncommon for the order to have a rounded up qty (like a not to exceed) for physical line items. So those lines may call for 100 of Part XYZ-123, but only 92 were needed - thus leaving 8 as unfulfilled demand.
Wouldn’t the proper way to kill this demand for the 8 unneeded pieces be to close the Order Line?
When an order has no more shipping to be done - this may include lines that were under shipped, but do not need the remaining qty’s - The order should be closed. Why would you need to leave it open?
Does closing an order that is not completely fulfilled, cause any particular problems?