We have situations where a customer will place an order, and we will be making it. A few days later they may put in another order, and request that some portion of it ship with the previous order. All of the product is make to order.
Right now we manage all this manually via emails and order comments. I had previously made a daily shipment report that listed everything that needs to ship a certain day, but it has no knowledge of these special shipping arrangements.
Is there any built in functionality to handle this situation? If not, what would be the best approach to take on a custom solution?
I found this other thread, but it seems like the methods mentioned there are not suitable for make direct situations.
The first problem that comes to mind is then it would have the same customer PO and we couldn’t look up the new lines by the new customer PO. That would be a lot more simple than creating our own system, though…
You can use releases and release dates. This way all orders due on a certain day will show up as due for shipment and on pick slips. That is how we handle it.
A shipping schedule may be your best bet. You can ship a bunch of different orders on the same day and show many POs on the Shipment. The shipping schedule would simply be a dashboard that helped you aggregate by date.
We have the same situation, but where we need to mix various orders from and POs with varying degrees of MTO and Stock all shipping together to save on freight. A consideration I had was allowing Orders to be linked together via a record in some UD table and then at shipping or with some sort of report allowing them to be recalled together, or if one is loaded notifying that others are to ship with that same order. I don’t have it fully baked but something on that lines where there is a Many to Many relationship somewhere
Hmm, that might would work if the dates were being changed properly. Part of the problem I am trying to solve is a communication problem, sales will just put a note or send an email stating what should go with what, but the dates stay the same. So they have to hold product “past” its shipment date.
Yeah, I think I may have to do something like that. I wonder if there is a 3rd party shipping integration that does that for us, we are thinking about upgrading at some point.
If data isn’t being managed, then best of luck! You can try an updateable dashboard to allow the users to see all dates for a customer and align the orders.
Its not hopeless, we have improved - we weren’t even using releases before… I just have to figure out why we are not using the dates properly, there is usually a reason even if it makes me groan.
As Jason mentioned Epicor or any ERP for that matter has to be data driven to be efficient and effective. When we went live with Epicor about 8 years ago we did the following to manage shipping and order changes.
Designed a dashboard called Scheduled Shipments with different tabs for Today, Tomorrow, this week, next week, late releases etc. It has all the details with customer names, cities etc. The shipper can sort it by any field and can know all the order releases going to a customer, city etc. The dashboard refreshes every 10 minutes so it is always current. Shippers were told to only follow this dashboard and ignore all emails from salespersons on order changes. If any salesperson were to complain they were to be directed to me. Till date no one has approached me on this.
Held a meeting of sales team and told to convey all order changes to the customer service group (and not shipping because of reason above) who will then make the changes on quantity, etc on the order line/release itself. Customer service personnel were told to make changes promptly so that the dashboard is always current.
This has been working very well for us. Since all our shipments are LTL through various carriers the dashboard helps the shippers plan their carrier scheduling and also cannot miss any shipments, since at the end of the day the tab with Due Today has to be empty.
We did exactly the same. I have created an updatable dashboard having tabs for late, today, tomorrow, and future… where the shipper can update with info such as “carrier has been reserved at time X”. etc…every combination of order, ship date, line and release is a row.