RE: Part shipments in COM -- MAPICS-L

Hello Andrea

Both the options you suggest have a problem:

'No Part Shipments' , I believe, refers to a Customer Order Line rather than a whole Customer Order

Putting a hold flag on the whole Customer Order would prevent any stock being allocated by an allocation run - thus you would find yourself either a) 'losing' stock to other non-held Customer Orders; or b) having to write a complex program to identify that 'free' stock was available to you and to run this regularly and act immediately upon it's output; or c) Modify the standard MAPICS code to take off the hold, allocate what it can, and then put the hold back on.

My old company took option 'C' but did have an army of programmers! Beware - the allocation and pick list generation routines are heavily 'entangled' you get some weird results unless you know all the relevant files.

At the my current company I introduced the practice of regular 'allocation only' runs (in a controlled warehouse environment) using the standard 'Stock Pick' screen. This ensures that stock is allocated in the correct sequence according to manufacturing due-date. We call a lot of our pick lists by 'ZONES'. (The other mass identifier available is 'GEOGRAPHIC LOCATIONS'). We set aside a zone, 11, which is for 'one consignment' orders - i.e. one hit shipments. By writing a suite of queries one is able to identify if all the lines on a Customer Order have an allocated quantity equal to the unshipped quantity. A printout can be produced listing all these 'complete' customer orders which can then be called as required.

A major drawback to the above method is the situation where one customer has a mixture of requirements - i.e. one hit shipments vs dribs & drabs. I can only suggest that a lot of thought is required up front to think of the least bureacratic way of managing the allocation and pick list generation process (which is a bit of a pig in terms of flexibility!).

Cheers and Goodluck !

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrea Rosner [mailto:arosner@ozemail.com.au]
Sent: 20 October 2000 05:34
To: Mapics List
Subject: Part shipments in COM

Dear All,

I wonder if anybody had a similar problem.

Our customer service people were able in BPCS to enter an order and add a 'T' which stopped shipment until all goods were available. The system released the order without input from customer service when all goods were available.

In Mapics this option by order is not available.

I offered the manual hold option in COM by order that can be actioned by user (and has to be maintained)

and the option to flag a customer as no part shipments allowed. Both options have been rejected by managment.

Any suggestions?

We are on XA R4 with IFM installed.

Regards,

Andrea Rosner-Piesch

SLI Australia