We are wanting all new quotes to have a Ship To default as “To Be Determined,” no matter the customer. This is really just a fix for people not updating the correct Ship To, and it’s causing production issues. So the “TBD” is a flag for everyone.
At first, I was thinking a simple data directive on QuoteHed; however, I cannot access ship to lines from that table. It’s the Ship To ID (or Num maybe) that has to be assigned.
So, my next thought was that every customer in the DB will need this “TBD” address as an available Ship To option, and then I can set that as the default for the customer. But this brings up the issue of remembering to add that for all new customers.
I’m looking for ideas on ways to implement this and/or thoughts on how I can have that Ship To added when a new customer is added. Is there a way to add to the Ship To table from a data directive on Customer table, for example?
Well, it would depend on how long you need to to stay as TBD.
You could do a Post Directive on Quote.GetNewQuoteHeader (or whatever it’s called) that sets QuoteHed.ShipToNum = “To Be Determined”.
It will pop that in the field and then when they try to save, it will tell them “Invalid Ship To” which should prompt them to change it.
That’s an interesting idea… I think they need it to be able to save and come back later because I had suggested an alert when they mark it as quoted, for example, and didn’t seem to like that. But I will keep that idea as a back up! Thank you!
I would caution against setting it so it saves for this reason here. If you set it to be TBD, it could cause the same downstream issues, IE, it gets produced and shipping has no idea what to do with it. You would then need to go back and fix everything after the fact.
I agree I don’t normally like catering to laziness haha… however, the circumstance now is that the shipping address is a corporate headquarters instead of a job site, which very problematic because it would be accepted by the freight company. So this would be a huge improvement because our shipping coordinator would know it’s not a real address, and we can at least fix the sales order before actually shipping. Not so much a concern to get it right on the quote.
Edit: I will however take your advice and see what they think about not allowing save
That makes sense. We do have a single customer where we have what you suggest where the primary ship to is essentially a TBD. It does work well.
The maintenance for every customer would be tedious, but if you’re savvy enough, you can create a BPM to automatically generate the default ship to for you.
That’s what I was thinking. I’m not savvy enough though I’ve done many BPMs, but have never linked between separate tables. In this case, a BPM could trigger on new customer records, but the Ship To information lives in a separate table. I know there is a way to do it, just need some guidance.
I’ll scour the forum and see if I can find a different use case…
If you’re wanting to change the default address for every quote, you could create a BPM that ticks the One Time Ship To box on any new quotes and then sets one of the ship to address fields to “To be determined”.
I always forget about OTS. @jnbadger definitely start with this route vs creating primary ship tos for all customers. It will be a substantially easier BPM to create as well.
I’ve done many BPMs, but have never linked between separate tables. In this case, a BPM could trigger on new customer records, but the Ship To information lives in a separate table. I know there is a way to do it, just need some guidance.