Loads, Shipments, and Waves Oh My! Part 3: Multiple Shipments

PART 3 of 3- Multiple Shipments: One Load to multiple Shipments and sales orders

Dynamics 356 for Operations offers the flexibility to manage outbound warehouse processes from the most basic order and ship processes to the most complex load planning requirements.  D365O uses a variety of concepts that allows this flexibility through configuration and management processes.  

This blog series will cover scenarios which represent several common practices used in warehouses today.  These scenarios will illustrate how key D365O Warehouse Management concepts and configuration considerations used to enable the desired process design to meet the most simple and complex requirements.

We will address three process scenarios regarding outbound order management:

• Part 1- Single Order:  One-to-one relationship between sales order and shipment
• Part 2- Multiple Order: One shipment to many sales orders
• Part 3- Multiple Shipment:  One Load to multiple Shipments and sales orders.

The focus of this blog series is to illustrate the how the concepts of loads, shipments, and waves are related to each other as well as their relationship to sales orders. 

Below is a diagram illustrating a somewhat complex scenario that can be achieved in D365 for Operation Warehouse Management.   While this illustration represents an advanced process that is quite plausible, we will break this process into simple parts and simple processes before revisiting it later in the series.  The diagram below is meant to represent an overview of the “big-picture” process.

To put the illustration below into words, think of a load as the object the delivery will be carried in.  This can range from a shipping container or semi-truck to a single package that is delivered via parcel.  These loads can contain one or multiple shipments.  Shipments represent the portion of the load that will be delivered to a single destination (generally a customer).  One or more sales orders can be in a single shipment.  Consider the load and shipment to be an empty truck and an empty pallet at this point.

This nested, hierarchical, relationship must be created for shipping waves and work to be created.  Consider a wave as the instruction to the warehouse how to fulfill a sales order, shipment, and/or load.  These instructions include “work” which represent lines on a pick list(s) for shipment(s).  Once the work is completed (picked and packed), the truck and shipment are now full and ready to be shipped to the customer.

Multiple Shipments: One Load to multiple Shipments and sales orders

As shown in PARTS 1 and 2,  the basic fulfillment scenario of single order processing and multiple order orders combined in single shipment have been explained. 

In this installment, we will now complicate things further and create multiple shipments into a single load to create a multi-stop delivery, the “big picture”, as illustrated above and throughout the blog series. 

As a departure from Parts 1 and 2, this scenario will only be executed in a manual process.  The automated process of load consolation is a function of Transportation Management Systems (TMS) that is not specified in the scope of this blog and would result in a very long blog. 

Download the manual process instructions by clicking here. 

Summary:

As anyone with even a little experience in D365O or any other version of Dynamics AX knows, there are many ways to perform certain tasks in the system.  This is especially true with the functionality covered in the short blog series.  Not only are the methods demonstrated effective, but there are other ways to reach the same result.  Throughout this series, manual and automated functionality was shown.  While the automated functionality is efficient, it cannot be effective unless all the components of the process are fully understood.  As mentioned earlier, even with an automated configuration, it is vital the manual processes are known and all key concepts are understood to successfully manage a warehouse.