How do you handle the business case of a customer submitting an order for multiple ship to locations.
Think home depot trying to stock your product in its 1000s of stores…
Do any of you have customers like this?
How does the ordering process go? Do they send you one PO per store location? Do they use EDI, do you use EDI?
Back in my EDI days, we would usually see one PO. If integrating with Epicor, I think I would use one order line and multiple releases, one for each ship-to.
We deal with Home Depot in Canada and everything is through EDI. PO, ASN and Invoice. In our case everything goes through their DCs as cross dock.
There is one order per store. All orders are sent to their DC and they take care of shipping to their store. Each pallet is labelled with SSCC labels which is sent on ASN so they already know what to expect.
Your arrangement may be different and may require shipments to the store direct, which also we did in the past.
Vinay Kamboj
Thanks Mark. It seems that this becomes problematic at a certain point depending on how many releases you add. Problematic in terms of performance.
We will try it again maybe once we get kinetic.
Vinay,
Thank you for your input. In our case we are not shipping to DCs all the time, sometimes we ship direct to their stores.
The other thing is I don’t know how many of our orders are repeat from big box stores or if it varies from month to month.
I feel like setting up EDI for low volume ordering is more hassle than it is worth, would you agree?
Maybe someone with Demand Management can jump in. This may be more performant than just using sales orders.
My first Epicor implementation was for a fixture company where we did rollout’s to chains such as Macy’s, Kohl’s, Radio Shack, TJ Maxx and since we were producing unique fixtures we did not do EDI. We could have 1000 releases each to a different Ship To and the performance was bad. Over the years I have worked with other fixtures companies, some with EDI, but again the sheer number of releases caused performance issues. You may want to look to DMT, building the releases in excel and then upload them or, in our case, we wrote a custom order entry menu that bypassed the Epicor order line and releases objects just to get the releases to load faster. We also had to maintain changing dates on all those releases and the customization made those changes a lot quicker
Dang @mjfwagner ! That sounds like a huge headache! Way to power through.
Thank you for sharing your experience.
-Utah
We get about 200 orders per week from THD. Then we have some customers who demand EDI even if it is one order per week.
You need Demand Management module to import orders. The advantage with EDI orders is it is fully automated, meaning the orders are imported into Epicor without any manual intervention. After that each customer is treated differently, depending on how much confidence we have in the price they are using on their orders.
For EDI you can use the EDI module that Epicor offers or a third party. We use a third-party VAN to maintain the maps, which we found was much cheaper.
We use EDI in one of our companies. It is nice.
The thing is, these are all job shop parts, parts on the fly.
Almost the exact same situation as @mjfwagner described.
For
For outbound files Epicor supplies the RDD and Report Styles to use. Epicor can also create outbound files definition in Excel format which is what we have done, since they are easy to maintain if more fields have to be added.
You should read the EDI technical reference guide on Epicweb for your version.
Would you agree that setting up EDI for low volume would not be worth it though Vinay?
Imagine a customer orders from you twice a year. Or maybe just once ever…
Would trying to configure an EDI partnership with them really be worth it?
Okay