When outsourcing you have to send the material to your supplier, which is needed to either manufacture or to pack the parts that you in turn will purchase. When entering the purchase order line, any components entered in a product structure in IFS/Manufacturing Standards is copied to the purchase order line. In case a product structure is not used, you can manually specify the components. These parts will be sent to the supplier with each purchase order. You should also reserve the material in inventory if it is not automatically done by the system.
This function does not allow you to charge, i.e., sell the material or the components to your supplier. Therefore, when the material is sent to the supplier it is always considered as work in progress and accounted as such.
Depending on the requirements or practices of your industry, instead of sending the component parts with each purchase order, you can backflush them. Backflushing involves transporting the component material to a special backflushing location in advance, and automatically issuing the components as and when the purchase parts (top parts) are received from the supplier. There is no need for reservation or picking, as the components are to be directly issued.
In case a product structure is not used (or when you have manually entered a component line), you must enable the Backflush option and specify a backflushing location in the Supplier Material for Purchase Order Line page. Otherwise these values would be used by default for every product structure, in IFS/Manufacturing Standards. Note that backflushing is enabled per component line; therefore you could choose to backflush some components and send the other components through the normal supplier material flow.
Note that Project Inventory supply code is allowed only for purchase order lines that are connected to project activities. In such cases, parts can be reserved and picked only from the project inventory of the connected project.