Tracking vendor returns sent back for repair or analysis

Expertise Engineering / BOMs
1

What is the best way to handle RMAs when we are the customer? It seems all guides on RMAs are geared towards customers returning product to us, but what about the reverse? To be clear, I’m aware of the vendor return feature, but this seems to only handle the situation where we return product for a refund or credit.

I am far more concerned about tracking expensive components that we return to the vendor for repair or analysis. In these instances, the vendor may hold onto the parts (which we still own) for weeks or even months, and then either return replacement parts, repaired parts, or the original parts - good or bad - depending on warranty or who is at fault for the failure.

The question is how do we track this process? In particular:

  • How do we remove these from inventory temporarily. We don’t want to mistakenly believe we have more inventory than we do.
  • How do we keep track of parts returned to vendors, to ensure they are not lost or forgotten (return PO?)
  • How do we track costs associated with the return, for example a repair fee or shipping?
  • How do we receive the product back into inventory, without losing traceability?
2

@JesseH

Hey Jesse,

Welcome back to the forum! Thanks for inputting this ticket thread here regarding your vendor return questions.

I’m going to pass this along to our team internally and get some clarification/details to provide regarding the best practice here.

I’ll be in touch with an update as soon as they’ve sent this back my way.

Thanks,
Cetec ERP Support

3

Hey Jesse,

Notice that you’re standard support! You’ll get a quicker response if you submit that into the ticket queue that you have access to.

Please submit a ticket into the support queue and I’ll get that taken care of.

Thanks!
Cetec ERP Support

4

Will do. I posted here because I assumed others would benefit from it. I searched the forum and found one or two similar questions, but they were either more specific or didn’t have a clear answer.

1 Like
5

I would like to learn about the best practices here too. @JesseH or @cetecerp21, please share if possible!

6

Short version is that, given that you’re tracking inventory that Peak Robotics still owns (even though physically it’s at your vendor’s facility), you should consider having a separte virtual warehouse (LNAME in admin >> maintenance >> data maintenance) to track these. See comments to your specific questions below:

1) How do we remove these from inventory temporarily. We don’t want to mistakenly believe we have more inventory than we do.

If you have a separate virtual warehouse for this purpose (whether vendor-specific or a generically named “at vendor”), you can transfer inventory out of your Main normal warehouse and into the “at vendor” warehouse. This helps track that you don’t actually have the inventory available in your Main warehouse. MRP, for example, can be run on a warehouse/location specific basis so that you can segment shortage/availability per location or ALL.

2) How do we keep track of parts returned to vendors, to ensure they are not lost or forgotten (return PO?)

You could do this with a warehouse transfer, or Vendor Return, from the Main warehouse to the secondary warehouse. You could also do this with a purchase order to a fake “intercompany” vendor setup for these kinds of purposes.

3) How do we track costs associated with the return, for example a repair fee or shipping?

This would need to be a separate additional purchase order to a vendor, but needs to be an external vendor, and line items would likely be non-inventory generic part numbers for fees/shipping/etc. - as this will be a normal vendor PO with attendent A/P billing/vouchering etc. Alternatively you could handle as a one-off voucher, one-off check, or one-off GL entry. However, having the actual vendor PO is best practice because it provides reporting ability and backing/justification to these charges.

4) How do we receive the product back into inventory, without losing traceability?

This would be a warehouse transfer back, from the virtual vendor warehouse, into your normal warehouse. You can see the “warehouse transfer” blue button on any part record page.

Here is a how to tutorial - How To Perform a Warehouse Transfer