For our Cold Storage Software, each Putaway Pallet can be 'tagged' with a Manual Id. This miscellaneous use field allows you to enter a container Id, an internally managed identifier, or anything else deemed appropriate or necessary by your operations team to identify the inbound product as a bundle. It has been noted that, for most of our customers, this should be treated as a one-time-use entity. Allowing the same Manual Id to be used again on a different inbound shipment is possible, but unlikely. We have thus enhanced the software to include a warning noting that the entered Manual Id has already been used in the past. This enhancement proved very beneficial, also, in preventing the same inbound shipment from being entered into the ERP system twice. This may not be realistic in some operations but reasonably possible in others.
Software for the Frozen Storage Industry or Cold Storage Industry faces challenges posed by various requirements from different types and styles of the industry's operations approach. Many have challenges others do not need to take into account. Our Inpired Portal product is designed to be simple, while at the same time providing various tools which accommodate both smaller operational needs as well as large fully automated ones.
It's clearly not uncommon for an outbound Sales Orders to be edited by multiple individuals throughout it's life cycle. Most WMS ERP systems suffer from locking issues or concurrent-use collisions. The key to solving this problem is to allow things to occur, but also inform you of what's potentially happening. Our messaging ERP system recently implemented in our Sales Orders section warns the user that someone else was editing the order. While it also handles cases where two users are in the order at the same time potentially overriding each others changes. This would result in more than just a warning.
ERP Software often encompasses a "Front of the House" team such as sales or customer service, as well as a "Back of the house" warehouse team picking and shipping orders. The mentioned enhancement is also useful to encourage better communication between the various teams involved in an order. For instance, someone in sales may be creating an order over several minutes while an angst warehouse employee jumps the gun to release the order for picking. Both would be alerted in slightly different ways to prevent mistakes and encourage better communication.
It's has been proven common in the service industry to employ a "never say no to a customer" strategy. For instance, a customer may request that Weights be taken and supplied as a service for a Sales Order Line as an ad-hoc request. This is now allowed in our ERP Software for the Frozen Storage Industry / Cold Storage Industry and for / Food Distribution
Traditionally Catch Weight items must always contain specific unit-level weights prior to shipment and invoicing. The above request is for when a non-Catch-Weight item is fulfilled and weights are simply requested to come along for the ride. Essentially this feature forces the software through a weight-collection step prior to providing the outbound paperwork. It'll contain all weights for the fulfilled quantities.
Our warehouse management system now features including the available quantities in inventory for the product being entered into a sales order, in real time. The available quantity is provided by the Item (SKU), but also by Lot, by Manual Id, and even Pallet Id.
You may have situations where codes are interchangeable. Knowing during order entry that you're low on the specific product, allowing you to quickly substitute it for another product you do have available, greatly facilitates customer order fulfillment. This is very useful while having the customer on the phone during real-time sales taking approaches.