I am requesting your assistance regarding "shipment consolidation policies."
I am facing the following situation:
An export customer places several orders throughout the week.
At the beginning of each week, a new load is created, and each new order is added to this load.
To smooth the workload, order preparation must be carried out throughout the week.
To prepare the order, we use the packing station process.
When the load is released for the first time, the system creates a shipment number. The associated wave is processed so that the warehouse can prepare the order.
When the second order is received, customer service adds it to the existing load from the "Outbound Load Planning Workbench" menu and then releases the load again to send the new order to the warehouse. At this point, the system creates a new shipment number.
The problem is that in this situation, the container that was created to prepare the first order is linked to the first shipment number. So, when the operator tries to pack the items from the second order into the container, the system blocks because the items from the second order are linked to a different shipment number.
To avoid this problem, we use the "consolidate shipment" function.
I know that thanks to the "shipment consolidation" policies, the system can search for an existing, open shipment when releasing an order.
However, this functionality only seems to work if the shipment wave is unprocessed. If the first shipment wave is processed, then the system will create a new shipment number when releasing the second order, even if the first shipment is still in "open" status. Could you confirm that this is standard behavior?
Should we conclude that in the scenario I presented, the only solutions are either to hold all orders in the system and release them all at once, or to continue manually consolidating shipments each time a new order is added?
Thank you for your help.
Best Regards,
Valentin
