Best Material Type for Handling Non-valuated Materials in Distribution

Question

Our distribution business will soon be handling non-valuated material and I am trying to determine the best material type to use.  I am considering material type UNBW but would like to know if anyone has advice.  We are strictly providing a service to the vendor for handling these non-valuated materials (for example, wood products).  We will not purchase or sell the product.  Our service consists of receiving the product into inventory from the vendor, tracking the inventory, (in Warehouse Management) and then shipping the material to a customer of the vendor's choosing.  For these non-valuating materials, we are paid strictly for our service of warehousing the material and shipping to a customer.
Up until now, our distribution business has distributed only valuated materials, i.e., materials we purchase at a price and sell at a price.  We also use vendor consignment.  NOTE: This is not a vendor consignment scenario because we never buy the product.
Here are our requirements:
- We don't own the non-valuated product.
- We need to be able to ship these new non-valuated products on the same shipments as the valuated product we own.
- We use handling unit and warehouse management for all of our finished goods.
- We would like to use our existing processes and HU/WM RF transactions to receive and pick the non-valuated product.  This means:
1) Creating inbound deliveries and packing into HUs.  And applying our HU bar code labels.
2) Physical inventory counts by HU.
3) Creating sales orders that have both the non-valuated materials and valuated materials we own.
4) Creating outbound deliveries and picking via transfer orders in WM.
5) Assigning the outbound deliveries to a shipment.
Questions:
1)  Can a UNBW material that will be stocked but not valuated be received into inventory via a PO?  Any way to receive into inventory with an inbound delivery without using a PO?
2)  Are there any problems with putting a non-valuated material on a sales order with a zero price?
3)  Any challenges that other have run into?
Thanks in advance.
Rob

Answer 1

I must be missing something regarding the use of material type UNBW.  When I post the goods receipt for a PO with a UNBW material, no inventory is created.  When I create the PO, an account assignment is required.  I tried both a cost center account assignment (K) and balance sheet account assignment (Z - using a Profit Center).  In both cases, I am forced to check the "Free item" checkbox to avoid entering a price; which also seems strange since the material is UNBW.
I have searched everywhere for a "Best Practice" for my scenario with little results.  Again, we are simply managing the inventory for a vendor and shipping the inventory to our vendor's customers.  So we are acting as a third pary warehouse and shipper for the vendor.  We do not buy or sell the inventory - we are paid a monthly service fee by the vendor for warehousing their product and shipping it to their customers.  We may ship the product on sales order deliiveries that include both the "non-valuated" product (i.e., free goods we manage for this vendor) and goods that we actually own.
As an alternative, I am wondering if I should look into somehow using vendor consignment with a settlement price (consignment info record price) of zero.  Vendor consignment is nice because you can track the stock by vendor.  However, we would never truly "settle" with the vendor because we would not be paying the vendor for the inventory and would never own it.
Our business refers to this as "reload business" but I am not sure this is an industry standard term.
Any other thoughts out there?