I’ve run a series of tests and I can’t seem to get the Do Not Ship Before to do anything useful in Fulfillment. Typically, we run it with the SHip By date filtered to today and earlier. I can’t get my order line to show up in FWB at all when I filter by the Ship By >= DNS Before but Ship By <= OrderLine Ship By.
If I run it wide open, I see the line and it says it’s 100% ready to be fulfilled regardless of when the DNS Before date is. The only thing it appears to do is put a date in the DNS Before column… but it’s way off to the right and no one is used to looking at this - so does it actually do anything other than just display information?
As fulfillment workbench is picking/packing orders and some companies may pack orders 1-2 weeks in advance prior to shipment I don’t think the DNS method will prevent this. However, sounds like more internal training or perhaps a BPM on Customer Shipment Entry. We have our Picked Orders grouped by Req Date & Customer, generally we stick to our Ship By Dates or communicate with departments to get dates amended if they’ll accept earlier shipments.
Great feedback! Thanks for taking the time to do that. Our Parts Packing team pretty much ships everything immediately except whatever we may have a shortage of. Those are the ones that trip us up. Typically we set the ship by date to match the expected arrival date of the missing material… but as you can imagine, sometimes the missing material comes in early or late. Late isn’t as big of a deal because it will show up in Fulfillment as soon as its available. But when a part comes in early, we really want to be able to ship it. I’ve considered using the Customer Need By date instead of Ship By to filter to help identify situations where it is acceptable to ship something early. It was a toss up between that and the DNS Before date.
Another interesting note is it gets allocated/reserved in the order it appears in the screen. So, if you sort by one date then that will affect which releases get allocated/reserved first.
Are the ones that trip you up typically from one order which subsequently gets part shipped to the customer? If so, you could potentially use Ship Complete option within Order Entry which will only allow the full order to be fulfilled once 100% rather than partial, it’ll still allow you to reserve/allocate the stock.
I don’t know what the default sort by date is - I was talking about the filters. I’m not sure we sort it any differently than it shows up by default.
The Ship Complete is definitely part of the equation. As we’re asking more questions to the users, we’re finding that a lot of our customer parts POs are emailed to our inside sales team, who enter the orders. The acknowledgement is then emailed back to the customer with the assumption that they will want to minimize shipping and/or one part may not be of any use without all the parts. The customers do not always notice this detail. I’ve challenged the order entry team to consider changing their standard to ship partially when this case happens by default unless the customer requests to keep it all together. Further, I’ve suggested we add some flair to our acknowledgement that helps to call attention to that detail (either the report itself or the verbiage / subject in the email that Epicor generates). I think we can fix that part. But we still have the lines that we’re waiting around for parts to come in before we can ship. So we still have to get a better plan for that.
