This article is relevant if you are using NetSuite’s One World and working with inter-company transactions.
Background
In a recent client implementation of One World, our client has two organizations: a Selling company and a Fulfillment company. We setup the following transaction flow leveraging NetSuite’s inter-company transaction management:
- Selling company captured Sales Orders from a custom Magento eCommerce web site.
- Inventory items are marked for Drop Ship to be shipped from Fulfillment company.
- Selling company generates a Drop Ship Purchase Order to the Fulfillment company.
- We generate inter-company transactions to produce a Sales Order in the Fulfillment company.
All this works generally fine. However, the client is using OzLink to facilitate shipments. OzLink needs to have address information in specific fields such as street, city, zip, and state. While we could see the address information on the Sales Order, the specific fields were null or blank. The challenge though was that the situation was intermittent and thus difficult to troubleshoot.
Address Diagnostic
Digging into the issue, we realized that when you create a Sales Order with a Custom Shipping Address, when NetSuite creates the Drop Ship Purchase Order, it would copy over the address but not the specific fields. However, if the Shipping Address is part of a saved Entity record, the specific fields would copy over.
Visually, you can’t tell what is going on. It requires a saved search to see the challenge. Without those specific fields at the Selling company purchase order, they are not going to make it to the Fulfillment company Sales Order in the inter-company transaction.
Address Resolution
Since we already had some logic built into Sales Order AfterSubmit event, we had to trade off going to NetSuite Customer Support or simply resolving it ourselves. We elected the latter to save time and effort.
Take Control and Resolve Concerns
What we like about the NetSuite platform is the ability to take matters into your own hands. There may be times that we shouldn’t. Yet, many times, the business demands demand attention and the shortest path and most economical to solving problems is better than working back and forth with the ultimate responsible party.
If you want to get more out of your NetSuite platform, contact us.
Hi Marty, thanks for another great top on solving a gritty business problem.
When I looked at drop-ship, and separately at inter-company transactions, it seemed to me that you could not combine the two pieces of functionality out of the box. However, you imply above that this is possible ?
Hello Paul,
Indeed, I think I may have produced confusion. The client speaks of the transaction as “drop ship” to the fulfilling subsidiary.
The NetSuite Item type needs to support inventory. Yet, the selling organization produces a drop ship on an inventory item to generate the intercompany PO to drive the process. That same item is inventoried in a location supported by the fulfilling subsidiary.
Let me know if that helps.
Marty