Delivery Trip Management

One of the most common ways in which shipments are delivered to customers is through the use of company vehicles. This can lead to logistical issues as the company becomes responsible for planning multiple delivery activities each day based on the outbound transactions that are shipping from a particular location.

The Delivery Trip Management feature found in the program gives you the ability to coordinate these deliveries based on predefined shipping routes.

Delivery Routes

A delivery route represents a standard itinerary that is followed when orders are delivered to shipping destinations. Routes are oftentimes based on a geographical relationship to the shipping location. For example, you might have a delivery route for any shipping destination located to the north of your shipping location. Any destination that falls along that path would be part of the same delivery route. While the specific stops on a given day will vary based on the actual orders that need to be delivered, the basic path of the vehicle will not.

Because a delivery route is a pre-scheduled event, it is possible to assign certain default settings to it, including the shipping location and the standard days of the week on which the route is enabled. Delivery routes can then be assigned to shipping destinations such as customers or ship-to addresses. Whenever an outbound document is created for a destination, the program will determine if any predefined delivery routes can be assigned to the document. This determination is made by comparing the location and shipment date of the outbound document to the delivery route; if the document shares the same location as the delivery route, and the shipment date is one of the days for which the route is enabled, the program will assign the delivery route to the document.

Delivery routes can also be manually assigned to an outbound document. In addition, it is important to note that, while delivery routes can greatly simplify delivery trip management, they are not required. You can forego the process of defining and assigning delivery routes if you want to manually complete all delivery trip management activities.

Delivery Trips

A delivery trip is a specific delivery of outbound documents to shipping destinations. While a delivery trip can be based on a delivery route, this is not required. In some cases, it may be that the number of sales orders shipping on a particular route is so great that multiple deliveries must be made. In this instance, each delivery is a separate delivery trip.

The user can manually create delivery trips, then assign outbound documents to these trips as desired. If delivery routes have been assigned to these documents, however, the user can instruct the program to create delivery trips for a particular location and shipment date based on the delivery routes that have been assigned to the corresponding outbound documents. The program will automatically generate a delivery trip based on each route, then assign the documents that share the same route to the appropriate delivery trip.

An order's status must be set to Released before it is visible in the Delivery Trip Management window. Once a record has been created for an order in this window, it will not be deleted. If an order is re-opened, its status will be updated to Open and displayed in red in the Delivery Trip Management window. You can not post a delivery trip if any assigned orders are open.

Delivery Trip Processing

Shipping information such as lot numbers and alternate quantities must be entered for each order that has been assigned to a delivery trip. Additional steps may need to be completed, depending on how a delivery trip's location has been set up:

If a location requires picking, all picks must be registered, and all shorts must be reconciled. Once the necessary steps have been completed, a delivery trip can be posted, which will instruct the program to ship the items on all assigned orders and move the Delivery Trip to the Delivery Trip History table. Posting a delivery trip will not invoice these orders; this can be performed from either the source documents themselves or from the Delivery Trip Settlement window.

Delivery Trip Settlement

Although shipments are automatically posted upon posting of the Delivery trip, quantities posted can be changed after the fact. For example, a shipment is posted to a customer for 20 cases of a perishable item. Upon delivery, the customer determines that 5 cases have been spoiled, and is unwilling to accept them. This information will not be known to you until after the delivery has been made.

Using the Delivery Trip Settlement wizard, you can enter a posted shipment, then undo and change any shipment quantities that have been made to reflect the items that were actually shipped to each destination. You can then re-ship and invoice the orders that have been assigned to the delivery trip.