| More Marlow Cross Docking |
|
|
|
| Written by Marlow Atticus | |
| Wednesday, 22 October 2008 | |
|
One thing about automation... it isn't always automatic. Particularly when the tools are used in unexpected ways, which is often the case with EDI transactions. What may be normal for one customer's setup can be out of the norm for the other 99% of a manufacturer's customers, necessitating a change in procedure for that one customer... sometimes. Seems like a problem waiting to happen. As a case in point, one of my customers was alerted last week that they were out of compliance with an ASN going to JC Penney the week before. The issue was with the fact that a group of hundreds of Direct to Store Orders were being rerouted to one of their Consolidation Centers. This information was communicated in the 754 Routing Instructions transaction, and my customer missed that. In hearing this come up again, I thought I’d remind others that JC Penney has their own version of a “Cross Dock” program. Here's how they do it: they originally create one 850 per Store, then change from the Direct to Store Order model to a Cross Dock order model, shipping to the Consolidation Center. This is bad business practice in my opinion; it would be akin to sending an 860, changing the Ship To address on an order… bad business practice. My advice? Help your suppliers out by creating a new 850 with the ship to as the Consolidation Center, and SDQ at the item level for the store's allocation, like everyone else does. I think that JCP forgets that once the supplier integrates the PO into their order management system, the Ship To information is pretty much locked down. Their applications are not designed to support changing the ship to. In fact, I would bet that a request to change the shipping location after the fact requires the suppliers to back out the original orders and then reload them with the changed ship to location. I’m not apposed to what JCP is trying to accomplish. But the way that they are using EDI to support this is not helping the suppliers. Nordstroms… I’m still looking at you too with this type of thing. All the best (practices) Marlow | |