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<@U29JEQVL6> we have one primary facility that manufactures product that gets split between that facility and 2 other warehouses via transfer orders.   the main problem we have is that the transfer order for the other warehouses ties up inventory that we could be committing to sales orders for the primary location.  these are products that we only keep 1 week on hand of at the primary location so a TO basically wipes out stock for a day.  They don't want to increase inventory on hand for the primary location either

Hello, could you select “do not commit” on the transfer order so that the inventory gets committed to the sales orders?

if that does not work, you might want to look into "Supply Allocation" Answer Id: 87874.  I have personally never used to but have read through it.  From the sounds of it, it allows to match incoming supply (that has not been receivied yet) to demand

in your case the supply is the work order, and the demand is the transfer order.  You may be able to dictate what WO# goes with which TO#. Once the WO is complete it would commit to that TO.

let me know if you do try, would love to hear how it works

<@UB67425QA> Thanks for the input.  I've explored the idea of not committing the TO's until a work order is completed, but we'd still have issues with SOs on back order allocating the inventory intended for the TO.  I've also looked into the Supply Allocation feature,  but that seems like an all-or-nothing solution where we'd also have to manage allocations on other transaction types.  Another user suggested using a separate location, which is probably what we'll end up doing if NetSuite doesn't provide any other options with the 2020.2 upgrade.

What other transaction types would you need to allocate inventory to?

We also have allocations to Sales Orders.  The external programs we use to insert/process sales orders would not work well with the supply allocation feature from what I can tell. That feature also does not allow us to show the production floor which work orders belong to which transfer orders.

how about creating the work order in a seperate location and the TO is tied to that location?

it could be a sub-location of the parent location.  Probably will have impact up/down stream of the entire process but maybe worth pursuing?

That's probably what we'll do, only with one location for multiple end warehouses.  I think I may attempt to add a button on the TO to generate WOs and create a custom created from field to capture the original TO transaction.  That doesn't technically solve the issue, but it would be better than what we have now.