| Direct to Consumer Orders |
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| Written by Marlow Atticus | |
| Sunday, 28 September 2008 | |
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There is a growing interest among Retailers for sending orders to suppliers, to be shipped directly from the supplier to the retailer's customer. While this is a great concept, many retailers have designed their EDI program without considering what their suppliers can actually support. What I mean by that is that, I’ve encountered Retailers that create a Master 850 that contains more than one of their customers' orders at the Item level. What this means in EDI, is they are sending the Ship To and Sold To address information in an N1 loop at the item level. EDI does support this structure, however I will tell those retailers that are doing this, or thinking of doing so, that they need to know that this is very difficult for most suppliers to automate. OC Tanner comes to mind. Recently, in their 850 spec, they have decided to support both shipments to the DC, and shipments direct to consumer. However, for the Direct to Consumer they are planning to send the Ship To Name and Address information at the item level. I can understand that order applications gather customer orders throughout the day, and then create one vendor PO to feed to the EDI translator. However, if you want higher numbers of suppliers being able to use EDI for these Direct to Consumer orders, I strongly recommend that you create a separate 850 per customer Ship To, or the customer order number (some consumers can order more than one item at the time they place their order. So make sure that you consolidate all items from your master PO based on ship to). For those that support the Cabela’s Direct to Consumer distribution model, you’ll see that they do what I’m suggesting. They have done a good job with creating a separate 850 per Customer order/Ship To, however if I recall correctly, they are sending the same PO number in the BEG03 EDI element for each on a given day. They do have a unique Customer order number in an REF segment, with qualifier CO., Where it would be best to have the Customer order number as the PO number (BEG03), for each Ship To. This method is not half bad. For those that have been requested to support the Cabela’s program, just remember to use both the PO number and the Customer Order number when validating duplicate PO’s... that issue has bitten a few companies. Do well... Marlow | |
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