I spoke with Amelia and Tina V. today regarding product availability and here is what I found.
Today:
When an order has a back-order that can be filled within 72 hours and the customer had not indicated that it is a "must ship today" they put a 72 hour date on the order and the entire order ships when it is available. They do not call the customer in this situation.
When an web order has a back-order that cannot ship within 72 hours ("P" item) then it is a little bit discretionary as they whether/when they call. Because it is a web order and therefore the customer knows it won't be shipping soon they might not call unless it will be on back order for more than a week or so. If it is a fax order they are more likely to call because the customer has no idea.
After the initial shipment of a back-ordered order the entire balance of the order ships together on the last available date unless the customer makes a special request to do another shipment in between.
They have been working hard to teach CE Reps to look for availability in other warehouses rather than accepting an item as a back-order when it is not available in the home warehouse. They like the idea of shipping from another warehouse but want to have some rules/limitations. They would prefer not to ship something to "Maine from Nevada" under most circumstances. They also would like to look at the order size, back-order size, state, etc to possibly ship the entire order (rather than just a single line) from another warehouse if it makes sense. They are also concerned about the transit time issues but I think believe we can make it work.
Web orders are challenging today because the web allows each line to be allocated individually and we don't generally do this with phone and fax orders. They ask shipping to ship each line in the way the customer has requested but it can be tricky because the ship date itself is not captured by line.
The customer pays freight on orders under $500 regardless of whether the order is back-ordered. Note: occasionally, if the customer pushes back on freight on a split shipment, we will ask the warehouse to charge freight as though it went out of the primary warehouse. This doesn't happen very often though.
It would be very helpful to have the system tap into the MRP data to provide the availability date for Purchased items.
Moving Forward:
They like the idea of automatically shipping items from an alternate warehouse. They had concerns about customers who wanted their order to ship complete (together) and wondered whether we could ship an entire order complete from an alternate warehouse if it wasn't completely available in the primary warehouse. They also had minor concerns about transit but I think believe it may cause a little heartburn in the beginning that we can work through.
They liked the idea of automatically generating ship dates for Purchased items using MRP.
We need to decide whether we want to continue to allow to allow single lines to be shipped complete and ship/bo on the same order. If so, we need to tighten up the logic to make it clear and easy to execute.
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What we'll do by default:
- MOD items will ship on their availability date.
- Stock items that are back-ordered in prime warehouse can ship from an alternate warehouse if available.
- All other stock items will ship together on the latest available date.
We'll give them these options for bundling:
- Allow them to ship the entire order from the primary warehouse (when possible to do so).
- Allow them to ship stock with earliest MOD item (when stock is under $500 and they have multiple MOD items).
We'll give them these options for individual lines:
- Ship in 24 hours
- Ship from another warehouse
- Ship partial and BO the rest
- Ship with next MOD item.
What this will cover:
- Ship everything when available
- Ship my entire order together
- Stock on BO, need what you have now
- Stock on BO, okay to wait
- Stock is P&A, want it to ride for free.