Jacopo,
I think you should use the same entity as for Requirements which
currently links sales to purchase orders. I think that is
OrderItemAssocation. Associating sales order ship group is also the
correct thing to do, since a drop shipped sales order could have
several destinations in separate ship groups, each of which would
either have to be their own purchase order or be part of a different
ship group on the purchase order.
I think you should create a Shipment of "Drop Shipment" type for your
drop shipped order. (Interestingly enough, that type is already
there--I think David & Andy anticipated this a long time ago.) Then
when the Shipment is marked to a certain status, such as "Received"
or "Completed" (don't know which one...) then the order is
completed. We should then introduce SECAs that mark both the sales
and purchase orders when a drop shipment is completed.
I do not think you should create "bogus" inventory--that could create
confusion down the road and really mess up the accounting, as the
transaction did not in fact receiving and taking stock of inventory.
Si
On Sep 11, 2006, at 8:54 AM, Jacopo Cappellato wrote:
Hi,
the first version of the new drop shipment stuff is in svn (mostly
finished), but now I need a few advices to complete my work.
First of all some background information: drop shipments are
created when one or more sales order ship groups are associated to
a supplier (you can do this manually using the supplier drop down
box in the first order checkout step, but it is also done
automatically by the system for drop-ship-only items); when the
sales order is created, one purchase order is also created for each
of the ship groups associated to a supplier.
The sales order items in these 'special' ship groups are not
reserved/issued because they are shipped directly from the supplier
to the customer.
My first question is: how should I associate the sales order ship
group to the purchase order generated for it? Using the
OrderItemAssociation entity is an option I've considered, but I'll
need to specify the sales order ship group id as well. Another
option is to reuse the OrderItemShipGroupAssoc but we will probably
need to find a good way to distinguish between (a new type field?)
standard association and inter order association (a po associated
to the ship group of a sales order).
The third option is to create a new entity (any suggestions for the
name?).
My second question is: the sales order items that are in a drop
ship group are not reserved and shipped; when should I change the
status of these items to complete? When the associated purchase
order (shipment) is delivered to customer? And how this should be
handled? Should I perform a 'bogus' inventory receipt screen to
mark items that are received from the customer? Or should I simply
change the status of the drop shipment to delivered?
Thanks for your help!
Jacopo
