Major Description
Currently, it is possible to "drop ship" by creating requirements, creating purchase order to ship to the customer, and then receiving that purchase order into a warehouse: this process is not exactly a 'drop shipment', it looks more a 'cross dock shipping' where, after the product is ordered by the customer, it is purchased from a supplier, received in warehouse and immediately shipped from there to the customer.
The idea now is to create a true "drop ship" capability which directly ships an order to the customer without the extra steps and post it to G/L without holding it inventory. However the initial implementation will be very simple.
Here are some of the implementation details as discussed in the dev mailing list (thanks to David, Si and others):
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Data model changes/seed data changes
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1) SupplierProduct.willDropShip (new field): an indicator of whether or not the supplier will drop-ship that particular product
2) New seed data for Product.requirementMethodEnumId to list also:
- allow manual drop ship
- auto drop ship on low quantity
- only drop ship (never stock)
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Business logic
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The basic idea (first draft) is to automatically create a purchase order when drop ship items are sold.
No reservation, shipment etc will be done on the drop ship items of the sales order (drop ship items will be treated in a similar way of digital products).
The supplier will ship directly to the customer.