Drop Shipments for EDI Orders

A drop shipment order is a one-time shipment of an order to an address different than the customer's normal ship-to address. You define ship-to address information in the Customer Master Maintenance conversation.  The ship-to address is then stored on the Customer Name and Address file.  The defined ship-to address from that file would normally default to any orders created for that ship-to customer.  However, when a customer requests an order to be shipped to a location other than the defaults ship-to address, orders can be created with a drop shipment address.  In such a case, MAC-PAC permits you to create sales orders with the requested drop shipment address in place of the default ship-to address.  Drop shipment address information is not retained as a reoccurring ship-to address; it must be entered each time a drop shipment is used.

Example

A typical example of a drop shipment might involve a customer with multiple business locations within a single company.  The customer could order a part that might usually go to Plant A.  However, on this one occasion, the part needs to be shipped to Plant B.  The customer could then request a special shipment location for the merchandise, with Plant B as the drop shipment address.  In this case, when you create the sales order, you should replace the default ship-to address (Plant A) with the drop shipment address (Plant B).  Plant B would not be retained as a ship-to address for subsequent sales orders.

Processing Drop Shipments

In MAC-PAC, there are two ways to enter drop shipments for EDI customers:

·     You can manually change the ship-to address in the Sales Order Maintenance conversation to reflect the drop shipment address.

·     You can format the Drop Shipment flag and Direct Distribution fields on the Inbound EDI Sales Order Header file.  If an incoming order is identified as a drop shipment on the Inbound EDI Sales Order Header file, then the EDI Sales Order Generation program automatically formats the ship-to address fields on the Sales Order Header file with the Direct Distribution Address fields on the Inbound EDI Sales Order Header file.  If the Direct Distribution Address fields are not formatted on the Inbound EDI Sales Order Header file and the Drop Shipment flag is set to 'Y' (yes), then a critical message will be sent and the sales order will not be created.  You can correct this error by entering the address information in the EDI Inbound Sales Order Exceptions conversation.  Once the order is created, it is processed as a regular EDI sales order.

The Drop Shipment flag's valid values are 'Y', 'N', and blank.  'Y' (yes) indicates that the order is a drop shipment; 'N' (no) signifies it is not a drop shipment order.  A blank is processed by the system to indicate that the order is not a drop shipment.  The default value for the flag is 'N' (no).  MAC-PAC does not perform authorization checks on this flag.