Minimising number of shipments per order

We have a mix of inventory held in a mail order warehouse, in our retail stores and linked inventory in vendors locations.

We, like everyone, have to balance shipping goods in as few shipments as possible for efficiency and getting goods to customers as quickly as possible to make customers happy.

We only despatch goods from our mail order warehouse, so there are varying delay times to get the goods consolidated back to our central location before we send an order.

We have been examining the way we currently decide at what point we want to release an order (before it is complete). We currently use the slider in wave generation and have it set to a number of days delay before releasing any partial shipments.

This seems like a very imprecise method.

For some items the estimated days for delivery may be weeks away, but we will still end up holding the order for x days before sending what we have. This customer's order has been held up unnecessarily as we knew (using the estimated days) on day 1 that the goods would never arrive in time.

On the flip side, we often see that the x days delay releases an order, then a subsequent delivery from a vendor will arrive on the same day, but causes a second shipment on the same order. Again this should be predictable knowing the days delay for each source.

We have tried extending the days delay in the wave tool, but since the estimated days data source is not available in the reporting tool, it is very difficult to create a method of identifying orders that need to be manually "released" before the x days is up (Short of a manual review of every order over 24 hours old - which is impractical)

Can anyone else lend an insight into what strategies they have adopted to help in this situation?

Jason

November 09, 2016 19:18

Sorry for not seeing this earlier Alisdair, I wasn't subscribed to this forum.

You need to turn on and configure Cost Based Routing in System Config to handle this decision making process for you automatically.

It will only be as good as the data provided (i.e.: expected ship date on a PO being wrong based on bad info from a vendor), but will be MUCH more accurate than doing it manually and will require far less work.

If you need help setting that up contact your Account Manager, or ask for help here. Once that is done your warehouse staff will leave the slider set to never fulfill partial shipments, and RO will take care of generating shipments based on the criteria you set in the CBR tool.

Minimising number of shipments per order

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