You have gotten control of your ordering by controlling your inventory with AA Inventory and AA Order Entry applications, now how do you get the product to your customers. Controlling the order fulfilment process is what we call ActiveApplications Shipping.
Shipping is what lets you combine multiple orders into a load that get placed on a trailer. Since trailers are consistent in size they can be defined to have a capacity and a weight. The capacity is the volume associated with each finished plant. The item weight is the finished weight of the item. A load is full when either the capacity of the trailer is exceeded or the weight that can be safely loaded is exceeded.
Take a look at the shipping menu
Shipping controls the order fulfilment process. That means everything from the point of order acceptance to delivery has shipping routines available to assist you in getting the right inventory to your customer on time and labeled the way the customer requires it.
Making things easy for your customer is what gets your company the next order. If the customer must have a tag on the plant with their logo, SKU and retail price on the item before it can be put in the sales yard, you will be the hero if you can provide it when the truck gets to their dock. All they would need to do is move it to the sales yard. You make them more efficient and it give you an advantage over your competition. More orders and better control are what AA provides to your company.
The other side of the process is that you need to pull items for the load from the right locations in inventory. This process might start days before the item is to be delivered if the growing location is not in close to the ship location. Pull sheets can reflect the additional lead time needed when an item is pulled from some locations.
Remember the comment on the labels your customer needs? Shipping can automatically print those labels before a load is picked so they can be put on the plants as they are picked. This saves the picking crew time and effort. The labels can automatically print on remote printers, too. Having labels printed in one location is not useful if the plants are in a different location. Once setup it is all automatic. The process is in the system and the system does it right every time.
What about printing the pull sheet in location order across all orders on a load. Shipping does it. That will save you time and effort when pulling plants for the order.
All of these features and more are available through ActiveApplications Shipping. Improving the accuracy of your shipping department makes your company money by reducing last minute emergency fulfilment measures. It save your nerves, too.
How do your build a load? It is simple. The computer displays the orders by a wide variety of options for you to select.
You select the orders to put on the load by clicking the order. The stop number is automatically updated. Orders already assigned are clearly highlighted in red.
Once full the load is saved so pick lists and labels can be printed. It is that easy to make a load. It is even easier to print the pick list
ActiveApplications Shipping is a complete order fulfilment application. Multiple tag ques that can be tied to specific printers can be selected. Once the tag queue is created, it contains all the information needed for a printer to print the tag or multiple tags in the proper format.
Although the detail is not shown in this example this image gives you some idea of the options used in tag queue creation. The procedure is to create load, print the pull sheet and print the tags. All are done through the combination of orders into a load.
Changing the order status will inform the billing department that the order has been shipped
The details on the shipping application make are many a varied. With this application you will be able to control the order fulfilment process and make the orders ready for invoicing with a minimum of effort. ActiveApplications Shipping is a tool your nursery or greenhouse must have.