Outside Vendor

Use a vendor that stores inventory outside of your current warehouse to fulfill orders. Set up at the item or order level.

The Outside Vendor feature allows you to fulfill orders for items that you do not have in your inventory. It is similar to a Drop Ship system; users can configure Outside Vendors at the item or order level.

How to Setup Outside Vendor for an Item

To configure an item as Outside Vendor, go to the item on Infoplus, edit the item, and set the Status field to: Outside Vendor.
If an item is configured as an Outside Vendor, and there is not enough stock in your warehouse to fulfill orders for the item, then the order will be fulfilled as an Outside Vendor order. See below for details.

How to Setup Outside Vendor for an Order

To configure specific orders or individual line items as Outside Vendor, use the Edit Fulfillment Channel action from the Orders table, and choose the Fulfill from outside vendor option.
Line items with a Fulfillment Channel of Outside Vendor will show an icon of "OV" in the Line Items table on the Order view screen:

How Outside Vendor Orders are Fulfilled

When an order is processed for fulfillment and it has a line item with the status of an outside vendor, and it has stock on hand for the item, it allocates from that stock, like a normal item. If there's a shortage of stock, the item gets put on an Outside Vendor Order, see the below section for more on this. If all line items on the order apply for the Outside Vendor order, the .000 order disappears and the .799 order remains.
Line items marked for Fulfill via Outside Vendor will always go to .799, regardless of if there is inventory in stock or not.
If you were to un-process the .000 order, the .799 will be removed from the system and the lines will return to the .000.
If you were to un-process the .799 order, the lines stay on the .799 but the status goes back to On Order. You can then re-process the .799 order, and the lines will be re-evaluated based on the current stock/fulfillment options (and may go back to the outside vendor again).

Features of Outside Vendor Orders

Outside Vendor, orders have order #'s ending in .799 and are immediate, upon processing, in a status of Shipped.
They have a service type of Outside Vendor, which can be useful for setting up specific Smart Filters. You can build workflows around this attribute, to manage to get these orders to your vendors, for the fulfillment, as needed.
Outside Vendor orders show a shipped quantity of 0. This is so they do not deduct from inventory.

Note: orders from Outside Vendors can not be edited in Infoplus.

Use Cases for Outside Vendor:

Use Case:

I created an ASN for my inventory that is set to Outside Vendor why is the quantity being updated?

Solution:

ASNs (or POs) are used to increase inventory in Infoplus. However, since Outside Vendor items are not managed by Infoplus, you do not need to receive inventory on Outside Vendor items. If you do, then yes, the quantity will increase.

Use Case:

Why won't my Outside Vendor item autoship? It has 10 in stock but it is not shipping or deducting from my inventory.

Solution:

If you have an item set to Outside Vendor, you cannot have stock of the item in Infoplus. You need a zero inventory for the item to autoship. Outside Vendor orders will show a shipped quantity of 0 because they are not being fulfilled by Infoplus.