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.
I automated the crap out of it, but it’s custom and not really helpful to any other companies.
I would prefer Epicor fix other more basic bugs at this point rather than focus on something like this. And frankly, I doubt they would be interested in this either because it’s not a “New feature”, it just highlights and issue that they have with their product, so it doesn’t help marketing sell anything.
It’s not really different than most automations I’ve done. I made a BAQ that had all the info I needed in it, added a calculated field for “Select” then loop through the results that are selected in a custom action. The code just follows the trace of what you would do manually just in a loop. Nothing really magical there.
That’s thing I’m not trying to disassociate the packing process with the business object logic, are you saying they are physically packing out things and then the automation loops through and “packs/ships” what they just physically did? How are you handling all the business object logic that exists around lot numbering, incorrect bin quantities, negative on hand, etc?
Correct, they pack 100 boxes, and then check the lines for the ones that they did.
Most of that is handled by using a BAQ so it won’t show up on the list to do it the requirements are met. They use the BAQ as instructions for what to pack, then say “I did what it told me to do”.
If they don’t follow what the list tells them to do… well, then the process is forked… Not really anything I can do about that. They could lie to the normal form as well too.
Part of the reason I’m not just going to drop my code out there is it’s very specific to this business process, and if you don’t know how to make the code, you probably aren’t going to understand what the code is doing to be able to modify if for your own use. I’m making assumptions/assertions that are very specific to my company/branch/specific piece of business. That’s the point of most of Epicor’s customization is to set most of the 100s of different “options” that are out there to do something that is always done the same way in your specific use case.
One of our biggest struggles/ frustrations is how slooooowwwww Epicor becomes when there’s multiple lines & multiple releases on one sales order. When this happens, we tend to shy away from using the releases and revert to spreadsheets… but then in the long run, this doesn’t help when it comes to Avalara taxes.
Make sure you uncheck “Ready to process” until you’re done with the order. For every change you make it makes a call to avalara for every line. So it gets unwieldy quickly. There really isn’t a reason to make that call until the order entry is coimpleted, but epicor won’t know you’re done do it can’t really wait until the end, unless you use the check box. Then when you are done processing, check that box, and it will make the final call after you do that.
