We have some business where a customer orders things for a bunch of their stores. The example we’ve been given is 134 different ship to locations. For this to be correct in epicor, you would make 134 different releases on the line, each with it’s own ship to. That’s fine, we can paste insert or DMT those in.
On the shipping side, we need to physically make 134 boxes, and print out 134 shipping labels to send the boxes out. That can be mass uploaded to one world ship via CSV to make all of the labels.
Where we are getting stuck is the data entry for pick pack ship on all of those pack slips and not drowning the warehouse staff in transaction hell.
(Correct me if I’m wrong, and I REALLY hope I’m wrong) If we use fulfillment workbench, we would end up with 134 material queue records that need to be processed, which would pull 134 records into picked orders, where someone would have to make 134 individual pack slips. That’s a LOT of clicks to make this happen.
Has anyone else tackled this problem in any interesting way? Our brain immediately jumps to automating all the things, which we can do, but it’s another different process with different tools in different locations. We’re attempting to keep things in some sort of standardish way here. I would love any stories of how other companies have tackled this problem. I have ideas, and I’ll expand on them if this question falls flat, but I figured we would ask first, because it doesn’t seems like this would be all that rare of a problem.
We have the same thing with upwards of 1,000 to 10,000 ship tos per line item on the order.
Really fun.
Completely outside of Epicor in excel right now, not even shipping them through customer shipment entry because of transaction hell.
Can’t even invoice them using standard invoice program because there’s no shipments to be had, just one big one.
Avalara we have to manually create an excel sheet of what we shipped, upload it to Avalara, get taxes calculated there, then transpose those tax charges to each miscellaneous invoice line as a misc charge for the miscellaneous invoices we have to create because we don’t actually ship in epicor. Really fun man.
Will be following this thread closely.
The only thing I can think of is, does the new fulfillment workbench process help in any way? Where you can write a custom BAQ to generate the fulfillment request?
Thanks for your input though. Good to know we aren’t the only ones. Might make a good idea once we can figure out a better spec.
One of these days I hope Epicor can start realizing that they have to start designing for more than one transaction at a time. The world moves faster than that!
Would really love it if we could start an interest group on this flow Brandon. So if you somehow have some strings to pull… I would certainly be willing to join the focus group and get this figured out. Because yeah there are manufacturers that are doing fulfillment on a level that distributors do and it’s clear that wasn’t really the vision when they designed order entry, fulfillment, and shipping.
