Re: [ubl-dev] Communication to a warehousing party

[Danny Gaethofs <dgaethofs@yahoo.com>]

Dear Kees,

First thing you should figure out is how you want to streamline the information flow between the Webshop, your suppliers and the outsourced warehouse (or 3PL)  and secondly what information you would like to share with each of them.

Do you allow the outsourced warehouse to see the price information (it is not necessary) as long as the invoice is created from out of the Webshop ?

You need to provide the outsourced warehouse the information of your sales order (customer order in the webshop) and the purchase order that has been created and send to your supplier, so they will know what will arrive and to whom it needs to be shipped. Maybe you can sustain with the sales order data (without prices) but with references to the purchase order that was issued. It all depends on the capabilities of your outsourced warehouse. Often I see that order related data is synchronized betwee ERP systems and WMS systems (when these are not integrated) . The DespatchAdvice almost always is processed by the WMS.

I assume that the outsourced warehouse has its own warehouse system not integrated with the webshop or with the ERP system of your company (dynamics ax).

Some answers on your questions - hereafter ?

Will Warehousing Inc also receive this DespatchAdvice? How does Supplier Inc know this?
Warehouse Inc is the recipient of the DespatchAdvice because it is identified as the ship to in the purchase order.
It could be of course - this is what my client in the US does - the DespatchAdvice is sent to the Buyer to inform them that the goods have been delivered to the warehouse or to the shop.

Question is whether you manage inventory in your ERP system OR not ?
I assume that the order / invoice created on the webshop is stored as a sales order / invoice in your ERP system and that automatically a purchase order is created for the respective supplier(s) from the sales order line items. This order contains the warehouse as the ship to. The supplier sends the goods to the warehouse and submits a Despatch Advice to the warehouse. You normally do not need (sorry: you probably do need the information on the Despatch Advice to present it to the buyer for track and trace on the webshop) the despatch advice for registering the receipt in your ERP system).

Who are the receiptients of the ReceiptAdvice from Warehousing Inc?
You could use the Receipt Advice from the Warehouse (instead of the Despatch Advice) to update your webshop and to update inventory in your ERP system.

DeliveryCustomerParty
There is a Delivery.DeliveryParty in the order.

Are you doing drop shipments - meaning are you asking the supplier to ship the goods directly to the end customer ?
As far as I understand it you do not- the supplier needs to send the goods to the warehouse. But does Supplier Inc. need to know who the end customer is ? Are do you have multiple warehouses ? Still this does not clarify why you want to have the DeliveryCustomerParty in the Despatch Advice while the delivery address (the warehouse) is in the Order .


Recipients of the ReceiptAdvice from the outsourced Warehouse
Where should it be send to? Directly to all involved? Or only to Supplier Inc as the “owner” of the received goods?

What do you mean with "Supplier Inc as the owner of the received goods" ?

regards
Danny

On Wednesday, February 19, 2014 1:30 PM, "Duvekot, Kees" <kduvekot@Wehkamp.nl> wrote:

All,

 

I would like to start the discussion on how we can implement UBL documents in the communication to a warehousing party.

 

Imagine the following example:

 

OnlineRetail Inc is running a online webshop where customer can order goods.

Because OnlineRetail Inc only wants to concentrate on running the webshop they have outsourced all their warehousing activities to Warehousing Inc.

So all orders from OnlineRetail Inc will state that the goods need to be delivered to Warehousing Inc.

Warehousing Inc will receive all the shipments from the various suppliers of OnlineRetail Inc, process the receipt and store the goods in their warehouse.

When OnlineRetail Inc makes a sale to a customer they will ask Warehousing Inc to collect the goods from their warehouse, package it and make it available for Transportation Inc to be picked up for delivery to the end customer.

 

So now the question is:

Which UBL documents would be needed/are used in this scenario.

 

I would like to start with the incoming goods side and when we have consensus about that work towards the outgoing side.

 

So this incoming goods scenario would raise a couple of questions straight away.

 

How should OnlineRetail Inc inform Warehousing Inc that they are going to receive goods from Supllier Inc?

Simply forwarding the Order is not correct, because it contains information that is not relevant, or even not intended, for Warehousing Inc. (Think about sensitive pricing information)

Also what kind of information should be send to Warehousing Inc? Should we include details on what we expect them to do when they receive the goods (inspect them, check them for completeness etc etc)

 

Who are the receipients of the DespatchAdvice from Supplier Inc?

                Is that only OnlineRetail Inc? If that is the case then OnlineRetail Inc should forward the relevant details from the DespatchAdvice towards Warehousing Inc. So how should they do that?

                Will Warehousing Inc also receive this DespatchAdvice? How does Supplier Inc know this?

 

How does Supplier Inc know the DeliveryCustomerParty details that can be included in the DespatchAdvice?

when Supplier Inc is sending the goods from their own warehouse they can issue a DespatchAdvice informing that the goods are on route to the requested delivery location on the related order. If you look in the DespatchAdvice document there is a “DeliveryCustomerParty” which, from the documentation, should hold the party information where the goods will be delivered.  They only received a delivery location/address, there is no DeliveryCustomerParty element in the Order UBL Document.

 

Who are the receiptients of the ReceiptAdvice from Warehousing Inc?

                Where should it be send to? Directly to all involved? Or only to Supplier Inc as the “owner” of the received goods?

 

And in all this we really also should included what needs to happen if Transport Inc get’s involved to transport the goods from Suppliers Inc warehouse to Warehousing Inc’s warehouse. So then we need to work together with the PSC and TSC to bring this further.

 

So can we come up with a worked out example for this and see where we might be missing documents, information and other things.

So this is to start an discussion on how to extend UBL, or clarify how UBL could be used in such an setting.

 

Kees Duvekot