I faced the same requirement on tank. And I belive the best way is to manage carts in stock. Inclure the product as component in the BoM and include the product as By-product in the BoM. So at the end the cards will not be available during the production process but they will be put back into stock as by-product at the end of the process. Doing so you can even managed the traceability of the carts.

Another alternative is to managed them as compoment (as before) but not as by-product. You consume the carts and then you use the reintegration plan to put them back into stock.

Oh interesting. I'll give the by-product a go and see if it works out! 

do you associated it to the first step of the route, or leave the operation field empty ? 

How about to use them as tools in WO ?

The cart set as a component should be linked to the operation using it. By-product are not linked to a specific operation. The system assume the by-product will be produced at the same time than the released product. 

Tools are only use for information. It maybe useful to use tools with the advanced scheduling to use this information as select criteria in the gantt chart.

Just an idea. Can we set the carts to be single product locations? So that when we put products in there, it's occupied, and won't allow any other products to put in there.

I guess, if you do this you will realize you are out of cards when trying to declare the production. By managing as a component, the allocation will identify the work orders short of cards before starting the process so you can reschedule them. 

Plus using lot number on cards, you will be able to add in your traceabily the exact card you used and detect risks of cross contamination. While locations are missing form traceability table.

 I think license plates will be supported in the next version and I think this could be used for this.   There is a video on SageU on new features with this. 

There is a field in a field in the stock journal file for pallet - PALNUM.  I had an idea at one time to use that to literally group disparate product on a pallet during movement.   Nothing ever came of it, i did not test it, and i don't know how it works.  

Activity codes >  Module Stock >  Activity Code PAL (Stock identifiers) 

Palletization

This activity code is used to activate the PALNUM field in the stock lines.

Remarks

The PALNUM field is one of the two free fields used to manage the additional stock information in the stock line. The second is called CTRNUM.

I believe you can't manage a finite number of licenses plate in this new V12 feature. This is perfect for tracking but it won't help you to identify a shortage of cart or to take into account this constraint in your scheduling.