It seems the North American FOB term is based on poor database design by including two meanings in one field! “Normalize that!” - Codd
Today, businesses can negotiate liability and freight costs separately and trying to use one field has become limiting.
Another problem is that neither really account for multi-modal shipping where it’s truck/ship/truck or truck/plane/truck or truck/rail/truck and the parties are arranging only a portion of the “transport” - which is why the FOB codes have been extended in North America to account for physical location like in the Miami/Chicago example Tim pointed out. The MFG may be responsible for freight (in any mode) to the domestic or international port and the buyer is only responsible for the other portion. So “FOB Origin” and “FOB Destination” are essentially only two of 100 (1000’s?) possible FOB codes for North America. Add in the international aspect of INCOTerms and we’re back to square one.
In the end FOB/Incoterms really applies to each party’s liability, Freight Cost applies to WHO is paying for the freight TO the FOB/IncoTerms location, and Ship Via applies to HOW it’s getting there…
All-in-all I have to agree with Nancy’s solution as well - drop all that you need in the FOB field and use the Freight Cost/Ship Via fields to clarify the who/how you get the goods (via the ‘transport’ mode) to the FOB/IncoTerms location.
And I agree that the IncoTerms/FOB field needs to be renamed and maintained as part of the base system, combined with (and maintained by) the CSF functionality (if any country has specific rules) - and the system should be allowed/configured to default to any such values based on the destination country’s rules.
We do a LOT of international shipping… and this is a giant PITA…
Just my 2 cents fellas…
Tthere are two calculated fields in the standard QuotForm RDD, “Fob” and “FOBDesc”. Anyone have any idea where these fields might be getting their values from, i.e. how they are linked to a quote? They do display values when manually added to the report.