There's a couple of unexpected complication to drop shipping that might
be worth considering here during the design phase, how drop-shipped
products are returned. Some business have to take back returns while
others can have them returned to the drop-shipper. Handling/Reselling
returns correctly would be great.
Another complication is combining products from different suppliers, and
calculating shipping costs. A feature that drop-ships only orders from a
single drop-shipping supplier would be interesting.
Thanks
Daniel
On Wed, 2006-09-06 at 21:41 +0200, Jacopo Cappellato wrote:
> Ok, so:
>
> 1) SupplierProduct.willDropShip: an indicator of whether or not the
> supplier will drop-ship that particular product
>
> 2) I propose to use Product.requirementMethodEnumId to list also:
> - allow manual drop ship
> - auto drop ship on low quantity
> - only drop ship (never stock)
>
> together with the existing requirement creation options
>
> Is it ok?
>
> Jacopo
>
> Si Chen wrote:
> > Yes, I agree with David on this kind of a setup. Technically it might
> > even better to have the drop ship properties be associated with
> > ProductStore, but that's probably over-designing it.
> >
> > Si
> >
> > On Sep 5, 2006, at 10:19 PM, David E Jones wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> This is sounding more like we need an enum field or something... The
> >> options so far could be:
> >>
> >> - allow manual drop ship
> >> - auto drop ship on low quantity
> >> - only drop ship (never stock)
> >>
> >> There may be others. I know we don't plan to support all of these
> >> initially, but the fact that they've already come up in casual
> >> discussion means that probably will... Of course, this enum is a bit
> >> different and should probably go on the Product rather than on the
> >> SupplierProduct.
> >>
> >> On the SupplierProduct entity we should probably have a field like
> >> "willDropShip" that is an indicator of whether or not the supplier
> >> will drop-ship that particular product.
> >>
> >> -David
> >>
> >>
> >> On Sep 5, 2006, at 10:45 PM, Jacopo Cappellato wrote:
> >>
> >>> David,
> >>>
> >>> thanks, these are good points. Please see my comments below:
> >>>
> >>> David E Jones wrote:
> >>>> Would this field, if set to Y, basically mean that if inventory is
> >>>> not available in the company's warehouse then drop-ship it through
> >>>> the supplier?
> >>>
> >>> The new field I'm proposing ("allowDropShipments"), if set to "Y",
> >>> would basically mean that we can ask to that supplier to drop ship
> >>> the item. The use case I have in mind is this: the backoffice user is
> >>> entering a sales order for product X and he discovers that its stock
> >>> level is low, so he lookups if there are suppliers that are available
> >>> to drop ship the item (allowDropShipments=Y) and selects one of them
> >>> (or just check a 'drop ship' box and the system automatically try to
> >>> assign it to one of the suppliers for drop shipment).
> >>>
> >>>> Or would it mean that it should always be drop-shipped regardless of
> >>>> local inventory? If not perhaps we might want a different option for
> >>>> that?
> >>>
> >>> Yes, if a product is always drop shipped it should be handled in a
> >>> different way: I was thinking to use (as is now for the current
> >>> 'drop-shipment' implementation - that is more a 'cross-dock' shipping
> >>> implementation, i.e. the purchased products are received and
> >>> immediately assigned to the sales order) the
> >>> Product.requirementMethodEnumId field for this.
> >>>
> >>> Does it make sense?
> >>>
> >>> Jacopo
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>> -David
> >>>> On Sep 5, 2006, at 3:13 AM, Jacopo Cappellato wrote:
> >>>>> I'm going to implement true (yet simple) drop shipment features and
> >>>>> I'll need to specify which products can be drop shipped per
> >>>>> supplier-product.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> What about adding a new field, "allowDropShipments"(?), to the
> >>>>> SupplierProduct entity?
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Jacopo
> >>>
>
