Drop ship process flow

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Posted on by Tim Wappat

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Question about what process others out there are using for drop ship higher with high numbers of orders.

Although we have adhoc, drop shipped in the past, a change has occurred that means we will need to drop ship large numbers of sales orders every day.

The sales orders are created in SOP with the sales order line marked as drop ship by econnect from various websites. Other sales orders are also entered by the tele-sales team and likewise the lines marked as drop ship.

Initially I thought that the back order quantity could be set on these orders, as it does not contribute to back order qty in inventory sites (IV00102) when the sales line is drop ship. The plan was then to use the PO Generator to pick up these orders and create the purchase orders for them at the end of the working day. Testing this it seems the PO generator is blind to the drop ship orders.

My move was using a custom sales navigation list that looks for drop ships with no POP-SOP link, then highlighting them all and using purchase as an action, only to find that navigation list builder didn't have an option to purchase as an action.

Sales Document Range Enquiry window has an purchase button, but no way I can see to load it with sales documents requiring purchase (drop ship status and not on a purchase order).

Our buyers want control and also to keep segregation of duties, together with efficiency, I don't really want to be generating the PO from sales documents individually.

So here I am asking the community if there is a way I've missed to achieve this before I embark on writing a bespoke PO generator or forcing my own list into the Sales Enquiry Restrictions window!

Tim.

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Almas Mahfooz 11,003 User Group Leader on at

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RE: Drop ship process flow

I am always a supporter of custom solutions. :)
Tim Wappat 5,701 on at

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RE: Drop ship process flow

Leslie & Almas thanks for your contributions.

The DocID is used to control document templates and other process flows so it would be difficult to use that for our needs. I like your idea Almas, but already use that field and importantly I guess we are looking to skim off the drop ship lines to get them to the supplier asap so they can despatch prep to our customers quickly. The drop ship items potentially are for next day delivery. The non-drop ship lines of the order, that can't be fulfilled from stock and that have back orders would get ordered through our normal daily replenishment ordering workflow for our own inventory.

I'm of the thinking now, after investigating the suggestions and trying to think outside the box, that a custom solution is going to be required to achieve a solid solution. I like to investigate simple standard solutions first before resorting to bespoke.

So now I'm thinking of using eConnect, creating a process to watch key sales orders (released) batches for new drop ship LINES every hour, scan the lines that are drop ship for immediate PO generation via eConnect, aggregating the PO orders by supplier as appropriate, leaving our buyers to tweak, approve, and release the POs in batches every hour.

I can't see a built in workflow that would keep this tightly controlled without mistakes occurring, missing orders or it being too cumbersome for the buyers to work with and them drowning in documents.

Tim.
Almas Mahfooz 11,003 User Group Leader on at

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RE: Drop ship process flow

Leslie, but it will even show non drop ship item containing Sales Order if we depend on only Doc type id.
L Vail 65,271 on at

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RE: Drop ship process flow

Hi,

Something else you might consider is to create a SOP document type ID for your Drop Ship orders. You can restrict the SOP inquiry according to Doc Type ID. Clumsy, but you might be able to make it work. I think the VBA is most likely a much better idea.

Kind regards,

Leslie
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Almas Mahfooz 11,003 User Group Leader on at

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RE: Drop ship process flow

Sales Document Range Enquiry window has an purchase button, but no way I can see to load it with sales documents requiring purchase (drop ship status and not on a purchase order).

Tim,

I am not sure, if what I understand is actually what you are discussing, but even that I am daring to reply. ;-)

I have created two sales order, ORDST2232 and ORDST2233.

For ORDST2232, I have Purchase and now have a PO2085, for sales order ORDST2233 I just save it without any PO.

Then I open Enquiry window and created new enquiry, and it shows me the sales Order for which I haven't Purchase.

But it is also showing me the Sales Order where item is not drop ship, by adding small VBA code on drop ship check box and using 'user defined' field Document Origin will filter it to only those sales Order where purchase not done and item is of drop ship type. whenever item was marked as drop ship vba code will update user defined field with any flag value in my case I used 'drop ship'.