I’m looking for some feedback on how you guys go about processing shipments - who in your business handles it and what the Epicor progression look like?
We manufacture custom furniture and will typically ship about 20 items to each final destination, we manufacture based on order demands. Some items are site specific and have the job tied directly to the sales order, other times we build to inventory as there’s also common items across multiple locations and pull from inventory. 99% of inventory items don’t have default locations assigned as they’re stored in multiple and move frequently.
Right now, our shipping manager is printing a Sales Order Pick Ticket and giving it to his team to pull the items together a few days ahead of shipment. He also will create a new PACK via Customer Shipment Entry the day before or morning of the shipment being picked up - in that case we’re manually adding lines (I have a fear of mass shipment) and selecting which location the item came from.
Some hurdles:
- Currently there’s a lot of paper and notation going on with the sales order pick list process - is there a better way to do this? We have several handhelds that we use, just not currently for order processing.
- I’ve been helping out and processing the shipments, assuming someone gets me the info on where the item was pulled from - or moves it to our standard shipping location, I can get through shipments pretty quick, but I understand more about the movement of items within our company than most others.
I’ve thought about using PCID to bundle together the items on a shipment, thinking the final processing step would be to pull the PCID onto a ship and it should pull location(s) with it.
I’ve also seen the STAGE function, but can’t find a great definition or a ton of info on it.
Anyone willing to share their process and/or feedback on the PCID or STAGE side of things?
-Andrew