Delivery Functions

The Delivery System is designed to provide your customer order desk with quick access to delivery schedule information. Delivery information is available within Order Entry at the detail line level as well as for the entire order. This option enables your customer service personnel to promptly and accurately answer a customer's question concerning available delivery times and dates. The Delivery System also enables warehouse personnel to organize shipments and efficiently process shipping paperwork.

The Delivery System automatically calculates the next available delivery date of a given route. When calculating a delivery date for your customer, the Delivery System takes six main factors into consideration:

Route selected
Current date
Header warehouse on the order (warehouse that will deliver)
Cutoff time for loading the truck
Departure time of the truck
Location of the stock involved

The Delivery System factors in delays for transfers. The Delivery System's calculations are only as accurate as your specifications make it. Pre-planning and precision when preparing and entering the data files allows the Delivery System to work efficiently.

The Delivery System also provides available dates for pick up and will call orders for each item that needs to be transferred on an order. If you do not deliver using your own trucks, you can still benefit from the information provided in the Delivery System. The Delivery System features are beneficial to companies who perform inter-branch transfers as well as companies with actual delivery routes.

Preliminary Delivery System Setup

Before accessing the Delivery System Menu and setting delivery schedules, you must complete the following steps:

Define your routes and regular stops conceptually, outside the Delivery System. Once a scheme is in place for all stops and routes, enter the appropriate data into the Delivery System files. A route is a group of destinations serviced on a regular basis. For example, a route could be defined as all towns north of St. Louis serviced every Monday and Friday or local Seattle delivery daily. There will be occasions where the same basic route services different customers on different days. In this case, you will need to set up separate two-character route codes for each schedule. For example:

Route AA = Seattle local on Mondays only
Route AB = Seattle local on Tuesdays only
Route AC = Seattle local on Wednesdays only
Route AD = Seattle local on Thursdays only
Route AE = Seattle local on Fridays only
Route AF = Seattle local on Monday, Wednesday, Friday
Route AG = Seattle local daily

Even though all of the above routes cover the same geographic area, they are created separately so that customers can be scheduled individually. You should note that each route code begins with the letter A. When running load sheets, bills of lading, and other warehouse shipping paperwork, you can specify A* (A and an asterisk) meaning all routes beginning with A. The system combines all A routes on a single report, representing the single physical truck that will service the A routes on a given day. It is important to plan all routes carefully before entering information into the Delivery System. Careful planning enables you to reserve certain letters for group routes, as shown in the above example.
Once you determine your two-character route codes, define them in the Classification Codes File.
Assign each customer a truck route in the Billto File. The Billto File Truck Route field consists of three two-character fields. The first two-character field is the truck route code. The second two-character field is the relative stop number. The relative stop number should be a number representing the position on the route or the approximate hour of the day in military format when the delivery is normally made. For example, 13 indicates 1:00 PM and 06 indicates 6:00 AM. If your stops are not predetermined, you can leave this field blank. The third two-character field is not currently used, but it is reserved for future use by the Delivery System.
If you use the Shipto File to store multiple shipping addresses for the same Billto account, then you can also code Shipto records with a truck route. The truck route in a Shipto record overrides the truck route in the Billto record if the Shipto number is used on an order. Therefore, you should enter truck routes into the Shipto records only when they differ from the Billto record.

Once you have completed the above steps, you can enter the files on the Delivery Systems Menu.

Delivery System Menu

The Delivery Menu is accessed via menu DEL.

File	Description/Instructions
Route File	This file defines, for each warehouse and route, the departure, cutoff, and call after times for each day of the week. In addition, it enables you to assign and calculate the number of days until delivery to your customers when orders are placed prior to or after the cutoff time for each day the route is run.
Stops File	This file defines the cities and/or individual destinations on each route in normal delivery sequence. It also defines the approximate arrival time of day for each stop and the number of days from departure to arrival. This file is primarily used for reference. The warehouse systems and paperwork utilize the Stop# field assigned to each customer in the Billto File, which can be overridden on an order-by-order basis.
Vehicle File	This file defines characteristics about each vehicle used. This file is used primarily for company-owned trucks.
Interwarehouse Transfer File	This file defines the schedule of inter-warehouse transfer trucks from each warehouse to every other warehouse. It includes the time and day that each transfer leaves and the number of days between each warehouse. This file is used to calculate total delivery time to customers for items that require transfer.
No-Run-Date File	This file defines holidays and other days on which normal deliveries are not made. This file also includes provisions allowing you to set alternate shipping dates.
Truck Run Tracking File	This file defines information about each delivery after it is complete. The file includes the total number of stops made, the driver number, beginning and ending odometer readings, departure and return times, as well as other information for statistical purposes.
Stop Priority Scheduling File	This file enables overriding of the normal delivery stops sequence when certain customers require priority/early delivery. Priority stops are optionally assigned daily by your order desk from within Order Entry. This file can be accessed and maintained from Order Entry as well as from the Delivery Systems Menu. It can also be printed daily in each warehouse.
Delivery Charges	The Delivery Charges system allows both fixed charges per stop or delivery, as well as variable charges by units, dollars, or weight shipped. This flexibility has been established to counteract diminishing margins on products. Creative use of these features can maximize delivery revenues where possible, while allowing you to meet competitive delivery rates on just the products and market segments that require them.
Print Daily Route Schedule Listing	This option prints a listing of stops in their normal sequence, plus any priority stops that were overridden for a given route on a given date. This report can be sent with the driver making the deliveries.
Shipping Analysis Report	This report enables you to analyze truck routes, carriers, will calls, and other shipping methods by dollars, weight, and cubes. It also enables you to balance loads by examining day-to-day statistics (day of week or month) for each route, customer, ship via, and so on.
Transportation Planning	The Transportation Planning module brings together all the functions necessary for the planning of inbound and outbound trucks. View a list of inbound and outbound trucks by mode (full truck versus LTL, etc.) View capacity versus commitments Schedule outbound trucks, by manifest and stop number, even weeks in advance Attach orders to trucks, building to a desired total weight, using an enhanced version of the Build-A-Truck program View a list of all outbound trucks that are planned, released to warehouse, and already shipped Update information such as shipto address and carrier across all orders on a truck simultaneously

Delivery Functions

Preliminary Delivery System Setup

Delivery System Menu

Associated Files