One of your ideas has been delivered from your suggestion.Improved Shipment Actuals Processing

This feature enhances the extensive Shipment Actual processing capabilities to better support scenarios where, on the same lane, there are multiple planned shipments sent to your warehouse operations for loading and the warehouse operation opts to load the equipment following an advantageous loading approach that deviates from the original OTM plan.  In this scenario, the actuals update(s) provided by the warehouse involve a significant amount of reconciliation and order swapping to update the OTM shipments with the warehouse loaded actuals.  To further complicate the processing of the actuals, the shipment actuals can involve both direct shipments and multi-leg shipment scenarios.

Enhancements provided include:

  • For multi-leg scenarios - deleting an order from a first leg shipment while keeping the second leg shipment associated with the deleted order.
    • Previously, deleting an order could result in a shipment becoming empty which would cause the shipment to be removed. If, in this scenario, you also have propagation on, your upstream and downstream shipments could also become empty as part of the order delete and those shipments could also be removed. This feature provides the option, in that scenario, to retain the upstream and downstream shipments - this is accomplished with the intCommand SyncWithOrder which extends the functionality provided by the planning parameter "SMD SYNC WITH ORDER". 
    • The intCommand SyncWithOrder supports two possible values: "TrueRetain" and "TrueRemove".  For "TrueRetain", both upstream and downstream shipments will be retained when the delete is propagated. For "TrueRemove", the upstream and downstream shipments will be removed. 
      • When the intCommand SyncWithOrder value is "True", it will be interpreted as "TrueRetain" to provide backward compatible.  
    • The default value of intCommand SyncWithOrder is trueRemove.  Note that the planning parameter "SMD SYNC WITH ORDER"  must be set to true.
  • Ability to add an order to a shipment when the order is on an order movement but not on a shipment.  
  • For the Add order scenario the IntCommand RemoveOrderFromParallelShipments has been enhanced:
  • The IntCommand removeOrderFromParallelShipments will now manage the unplanned parallel order movements, preventing the creation of duplicate order movements. When the value of "removeOrderFromParallelShipments" is:
    • "TrueRemove" or "TrueRetain", the parallel order movements will be removed and then recreated using the data from the shipment that the order is being added.
    • "False", the application will not delete the parallel order movements that are not provided on the actual shipment, this will lead to the order being referenced by duplicate order movements.

Business Benefit: This feature extends the Shipment Actuals processing logic to better support order swapping and other changes that occur in the warehouse and then must be updated in  OTM via the Shipment Actuals interface. These changes provide improved operational efficiency and fewer manual corrections.

Steps to Enable and Configure

Depending on the scenarios you wish to enable, deleting, adding, swapping  - some changes could be required to enable the new behavior an achieve the desired result.