Here is my favorite new feature in Kinetic so far (I just recorded the Feature Spotlight for it today).
with idea https://epicor.ideas.aha.io/ideas/KIN-I-5791 we added an optional feature to create a delivery plan where ll delivery related items are included on the delivery plan. (see image 1 below). Then when you are adding lines or releases, you can point the release at a delivery plan number, and all the info from the delivery are populated to the release. THEN LATER, if you ever change the delivery plan, the data is pushed to all attached releases.
Image 2: where you associate a release to a delivery plan… note how the dates are disabled. This is becuase the delivery plan is in charge of these dates now.
I’m trying to think of the main use case(s) for Delivery Plan, and all that comes to mind is keeping multiple SO lines, each with multiple SO releases, synchronized with each other. E.g., so that Widget1, Widget2, and Widget3 on the same SO all deliver together consistently on the same schedule, and if the schedule changes, then a single update to the Delivery plan will affect all 3 lines at once.
Delivery plan is per order.. you can specify as many deliveries as you want on the order, but each delivery plan is specific to that order (no shared delivery plans between orders).
Tim, that is one case… but there are companies who sell sets of things that all must be delivered on different days…
Scenario 1: lets say that you have an order with five widges… the customer wants to have monthly deliveries of those widgets at 100 per month for the next 12 months (ok.. just doing the simple math: 5 lines times 12 deliveries = 60 separate releases). In this example, you would create the delivery schedule for the 12 deliveries… then you would create the lines, and while creating the releases, you would assign each release to one of the deliveries. NOW when the customer asks for delivery 3 to be rescheduled, you simply change the one “delivery 3” to a new date, and all 12 releases are updated.
Scenario 2: you are a sign manufacturer, and you have an order for 5 different signs to be delivered to 50 different locations (20*50 = 1000 sales order releases). each location has varying delivery date. You would define the delivery plan (the 50 locations and dates) and then create the 20 lines, and add the 50 releases for each. Tomorrow the customer calls and asks for the St Louis address to change to a new location and date. They also revise the date on 4 other deliveries. Before you would have to look through all 20 lines to find the appropriate releases to fix. Now you just need to go to the affected deliveries and the system will update the lines/releases.
Note that this is NOT a feature for everyone, but it will help out those customers who have large linked orders with multiple deliveries and items.
@timshuwy This is a really nice feature and will help with managing deliveries for large orders. But I did want to support what @Craig is asking about here….
I have several clients who want to ‘tie’ orders together… they can’t put everything on one order per the customer’s unique Purchase Orders… but customers will ask for the various PO’s to ship together.
So I could see delivery plans being per Customer/ShipTo/OTS and then across orders sales could select the same delivery plan and then Fulfillment Workbench could enforce Ship Complete rules across all orders that share the same Delivery Plan.
(I know it’s annoying to release a quite feature and then we just ask for more, but this one inspire out of scope use cases)
This sounds like a very specific requirement, and not sure how many customers would really appreciate this.. BUT you can submit an Epicor Idea and maybe it will get traction. BUT Once this new feature is released, it would probably not be a huge effort for you to create your own UD Table Customization where you would create “delivery plan ID” that would have all the details of teh delivery plans to be linked, and put a UD Field on the core delivery plan, and then create a BPM to update all linked delivery plans. it would be complex, but would acheive the desired results.
How do Delivery plans impact shipping? Any chance shipping can ship all lines with the same delivery plan at once, since all those items are going to the same location on the same day? It would be realy awesome if they could.
well the “must ship complete” feature will typically do that in the fulfillment workbench already. there were no changes in the way that shipping works with releases. in fact, the changes we did with delivery plans only changes how releases are updated and kept in sync. everything elsle in teh system only uses the releases. Of course, customizations could be utilized to do more syncing of data.
We have some customizations around customer linked shipments, not sure if everyone handles it the same but I don’t think its uncommon at all for customers to request different PO’s to ship together to save on freight.
We ship multiple orders on the same pack all the time. I don’t believe it’s that unique, especially for larger-volume businesses.
For example, we may get 10-15 EDI orders from a vendor on Monday, then 10-15 more on Tuesday. If we consolidate the orders, it saves us time and our customer significant money on shipping. We did need customizations done on the EDI side to make this work, but I bet it’s more common than you think.
