I've been trying to solve this problem for a while, and it seems like
a pretty simple concept, but I'm getting blocked, possibly by my own head. I think that the confusion stems from a minimal confgiuration from the beginning, so everyone here is just so used to working with a mediocre implementation that it seems natural (and somewhat ineffective).
n.b.: My dictionary defines 'fulfilled' as 'carried
out to completion'.
When the Sales department enters an order for a product, each order line is
allocated (assume there is stock) but it's also automatically 'fulfilled' at that time. To anyone looking at the order in the system, it appears to have been ordered and fulfilled/shipped all on the same day, which is very much not the case. The sales department, at the time the order is placed, actually prints the packing slip for the shipping department, who have a set of files of packing slips by 'requested ship date'. This is because there doesn't seem to be a way for the system to tell shipping what orders need to ship on a particular day. Getting a list of all order that need to be fulfilled on a particular day is always blank- they were all automatically fulfilled when the order was placed.
I have a test company in the DB, in which I tried to create a new, allocated but unfulfilled order, that I could then have the shipping department find by requested date, and 'fulfill'. It seems to me that should be the natural process, but I couldn't configure it that way.
I see in the Sales Order Processing Setup, there is a place to tell the system to "use a seperate fulfillment process", but it's not available. Also, I see in the order listing that I can select a set of orders and 'allocate and/or fulfill' them, but they're all already allocated and fulfilled.
Am I confused in my understanding? We're not a complicated operation- stocking inventory for most items, occasionally, we have to backorder some items on an order, or delay an order's shipping until the stock is manufactured. Using Sales Invoicing, and (as yet) no barcoding in the warehouse. I'd like to move there, but we need to resolve this order processing issue first, or there's no sense. Making a paper-driven system less error-prone by electronic means doesn't address the biggest inefficiency of the paper driven system.
We don't use Sales Workflow - we're using GP10, BTW.
Can anyone advise?
