So Picture it… Sicily 1912
Let me build a little scenario and see if someone can come up with a clever solution because we’ve come up with a bunch and we hate them all.
We are fulfilling orders for a customer who sells a couple specific combinations of products
Kit / FG 1
2 Bottles
1 Accessory
As such we’ve crafted these nifty little packaging (we are a packaging company after all) that fits the two bottles perfectly in a die cut tray with a little hole in the middle of the accessory. Something like this (red square being the outside confines of the box)
Now the customer also sometimes sells a “smaller” Kit that is just 2 bottles and for that we use the same size shipping box but we swap out the middle tray with one that just has the holes for the 2 bottles like this.
So as a whole we have 2 potential combinations of product (or 2 finished goods)
FG 1
- Bottle 1
- Bottle 2
- Accessory
- Shipper Box
- Die Cut Tray
FG2
- Bottle 1
- Bottle 2
- Shipper Box
- Die Cut Tray
Now we are guaranteeing that the customer will sell some FG1 and FG2 so we go ahead and Manufacture FG1 and FG2 to stock a few hundred units. As orders come in we ship from stock all is well that ends well.
Except the customer has setup the store in such a way that someone can purchase FG2 plus the accessory separately. This Sales order comes in with 2 Lines
Line 1: FG2
Line 2: Accessory
Now when we go to fulfil this we have a conundrum, if we ship FG2 + Accessory separately shipping cost increases cause we have to package FG2 and the accessory separately in a new (bigger) box. But it is silly because really FG2 + Accessory is just the same as FG1 which fits neatly in its shipping box.
Now we could Pick / Pack and Ship FG1 with this order physically, but Epicor expects us to ship FG2 + Accessory which throws our inventory into dissaray.
We could tell our material handlers, to pick FG2 + Accessory , disassemble the Tray of FG2 and replace it with a new tray (swap the die cut tray) and place Accessory in the Box… however that would mean consuming 1 extra Die Cut tray from inventory without accounting for it.
So… what to do… we are looking at using Kits instead of FG, that allows us to build kits with all the components as individual pickable items but again we’d have to either include both trays and not use one of them, or find some other mechanism to determine which instance to use which tray.
We could do Build to Order on these but again the order comes in from their system as 2 separate line items, we’d have to have someone manually create a “Pack Assembly” job of some sort and swap out the parts (not sustainable)
Does anyone have any magical ideas?
One of the bigger issues we have here is that we inventory the Shipper Boxes and the Die Cut Trays we have to special order these and so we need to inventory track them. If we could just overhead not care about these then the solution to the problem is fairly simple.
