Automation Overview
Use order fulfillment automation in NetSuite to do the following:
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To assign fulfillment locations to sales order lines, determined by location attributes, item attributes, and one or more location assignment rules in a configuration.
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To create fulfillment requests for locations, based on the fulfillment location entered on a sales order line.
Automation relies on the occurrence of events in the order management workflow, such as the creation of a sales order or the deletion of an item fulfillment.
Automation comes with usage and limits and this is tracked on the sales order. It is free up to a certain number of automated sales orders and then you need to purchase additional automation capacity. See Automation Capacity and Usage Fees.
Automatic location assignment can run in response to events included with the Automatic Location Assignment (ALA) feature, and events defined in a script which then call a macro. See Automatic Location Assignment Macro for more information about the macro.
Automatic Location Assignment
Automatic Location Assignment (ALA) is a feature that lets you manage how NetSuite assigns fulfillment locations to sales order lines automatically. Locations can be assigned in either of the following ways:
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Asynchronously – If automatic location assignment relies on business events, the process runs asynchronously. This means you can continue to work in NetSuite while the automatic location assignment engine processes sales orders in the background.
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Synchronously – If you run automatic location assignment with a macro, the process runs synchronously. This means that if you have configured other processes in a workflow or a script on the sales order, each process must wait until the previous one has run.
With the macro you can trigger automatic location assignment to run in response to other events that are not included with the Automatic Location Assignment feature. See Business Events for more information about ALA events.
Any locations in your NetSuite account can be used as fulfillment locations, which can be classed as warehouses or stores, or left as undefined. Automatic location assignment fulfills orders automatically based on the items in the order and the delivery address, thereby reducing shipping costs and improving customer satisfaction.
NetSuite determines the ideal fulfillment location according to how the feature is configured. Setting up regions and locations permits you to set fulfillment locations within a specific geography as well as exclude locations. Defining automatic location assignment rules lets you choose the business criteria you want the system to evaluate to find the ideal fulfillment location. See Automatic Location Assignment for more information about configuring the system for automatic location assignment.
For example, you might have a customer in San Diego who orders an item that is located in both northern Mexico and the State of Washington. The northern Mexico location may be closer to San Diego, but it is possible that items from that location cannot ship to San Diego or the cost may be prohibitive. You can therefore set up automatic location assignment to disallow fulfillment from Mexico to the United States or a specific region with the United States.
How Automatic Location Assignment Runs
Automatic location assignment can be triggered by the following:
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Business events. Business events is a framework that enables the automation of business processes such as the assignment of locations to sales order lines in an asynchronous way. See Business Events for more information
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A script that calls a macro. The macro for automatic location assignment offers an additional way to assign fulfillment locations automatically. See Automatic Location Assignment Macro for more information.
Business events and the macro work independently. Even if you have not configured the business events for automatic location assignment, the macro still runs.
You can also trigger automatic location assignment by clicking the Auto Assign Locations button on the sales order form.
Fulfillment Requests
The Fulfillment Request feature adds the fulfillment request transaction to your order fulfillment workflow. A fulfillment request is a demand to fulfill an order at a location. You can create a fulfillment request from a sales order after line items have a fulfillment location, the sales order status is Approved, and there is no payment hold.
When you automate fulfillment requests, NetSuite runs the fulfillment request creation process immediately after a sales order is created or after an expected ship date is reached. Similar to creating fulfillment requests manually, the sales order must be approved and there must be no payment hold before fulfillment requests are created automatically. See Fulfillment Request Creation, and Fulfillment Requests for more information.