We have customer that sells only to distributors, just like we do. So it gus US->Distributor–>Seller–>Buyer
I have been asked to figure out a way to keep track of the Distributor, Seller and Buyer while drop shipping from US to the Buyer. All three of these are different companies. In the end, they want to have the Seller address on the shipping label instead of the Distributor address. This is a full step farther than Epicor goes and was wondering if anybody has done anything similar.
Ideas on this? One person thought of adding a tab to Customer Maint Called Distributors, and tying it all in. Not thrilled on that idea at all.
Which of the Distributor and Seller places the order with you? And whom do you bill?
You could always make the Distributor as the Bill To, and the Seller as the Sold To. And if the Seller ever wanted you to ship directly to the Buyer, you could do that with a ShipTo record for the Seller’s Cusomter record.
Another option is to do what you are currently doing, and use OTS (One Time Shipto) on the order and enter the seller’s address. Again, you’d have to do this on every order.
I worked at a company that had similar requirements. We used all 3 “customers” on an order to satisfy the requirement. Each order can have 3 separate customer records tied to it; the Sold To, Bill To, and Ship To.
Depending on the requirements, you can use the Alternate Bill To and Alternate Ship To functionality on the the Customer record. It is a little hard to wrap your head around at first, but once you do it works well.
Epicor also handles the Invoice well when using the alternates functionality. You may need to do a little editing of the reports, but it works.
@ckrusen@jkane So, in Customer Maint we add in the Seller, use the Billing->Bill To to enter the Distributor, and then shipto’s are whoever we ship it too. Correct?
The Sold To is the key and needs to be determined on each Order.
Let’s say you were selling me something. At my old company, we made the end customer the Sold To. So, I would be entered as a Customer. Then, instead of a Bill To, you would add an Alternate Bill To to my record. This way, you can just link the Distributor record to mine instead of creating the same Bill To address on 2 different records. If you were shipping directly to me, add my address on my account record. If you were shipping to the Distributor, add an Alternate Ship To on my account record to again keep the number of duplicates down.
We had instances where all 3 “customer” records were different on an Order. So, depending on which customer you were pulling on reports, you would get different numbers.
One thing that will drive your final solution, is if there is a specific set of relationships between Dist, Seller, and Buyer.
Can the Buyer get it from any seller? Or are these limited (like Seller B cannot sell to Seller A’s buyers)?
And similarly for Dist and Seller. Can Seller A get it from any Dist, or are they locked into a specific Distributor)?
And once you think you’ve got that all figured out, do a thought exercise of what you’d do if any Distributors or Sellers were: added, removed, or had a change of scope (say Buyer X is reclassified such that they should no longer buy from Seller A, but instead from Seller C).
Agreed. Very good points. Right now we only sell to distributors and we are selling to Distributor. However, the Seller isa lsoa Distributor, with the buyer being the end user. So, yes good points to consider.
Because the 821 page 10.2.500 implementation guide does not provide details on how best to do this (no search results for Distributor, OEM, and only 1 for End User in the disclaimer) what is the most efficient way? We sell to distributors that then sell to end users. We may actually ship to the distributor for a factory acceptance test, but we sometimes ship to the end user. We need to report on the end user Installation Location and the distributor. At the time of quote, we may not know who the end user is, but we should know at the time of order (if not, can we update this information on a shipped order if we find out after shipment?). Some end users have multiple facility addresses.
What E10 fields are the most efficient to use for:
Distributor (bill to)
Distributor (ship to if used)
End User (installation location - not necessarily the end user’s main location)
Any help or tips would be greatly appreciated, we are in the midst of implementation.
How many of the standard forms (quotes, packing slips, invoices, etc) would need to be modified to accommodate any suggested set-up?
