About Shipping

Overview

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• plan a load for shipment, see About Load Planning
• add material to the load that has a Shipment Status of “Ready”,
• print the shipment documents (automatically)
• pick and ship the load, relieving inventory of the material shipped. – See About Load Shipping

• maintain carriers and carrier freight rates,
• maintain customs brokers, and
• maintain customs duties.
• maintain default freight modes and weights

See Flags That Affect Shipping for details on how company settings affect shipping processing.

In addition, the default FOB point for customer pickups is set in the General Company Setup (STCOMP), General tab.

Documents to be produced on shipping are set up as part of company information in the customer profile.

About Shipping

The Shipping Management application includes the functions that are required for managing shipments:

• create a load for shipment,
• add material to the load that has a Shipment Status of “Ready”,
• print the shipment documents
• maintain carriers and carrier freight rates,
• maintain customs brokers, and
• maintain customs duties.
• ship the load, relieving inventory of the material shipped.

See Flags That Affect Shipping for details on how company settings affect shipping processing.

In addition, the default FOB point for customer. pickups is set in the General Company Setup (STCOMP), General tab.

Documents to be produced on shipping are set up as part of your company information.

Glossary Entries

Shipment Status

Shipment Status denotes that inventory material is ready to ship or not.  There are two values Not Ready and Ready.

Shipping Documents

Shipping Documents includes; Bill of Lading (BOL), Invoice, and Shipping Tags.

Bill Of Lading

The Bill Of Lading (BOL) document is issued by the shipping department and specifies the material that is being shipped on the load.

Invoice

The Invoice document is a bill issued by the seller to the buyer indicating the quantity of material provided to the buyer.

Shipping Tags

The Shipping Tags are barcoded tags attached to each piece of material shipped on a load.

Load

A Load is a single shipment on a single vehicle (truck, ship, rail car, etc).  Each load has one or more Bill Of Ladings.  A load can be created for any routing step that has a process code with a category of Transfer Instruction or Shipping Instruction.

Process Code

A Process defines the transformation of material that changes or adds properties to the material.  Process Codes define the capabilities of a company to transform material.  Each Process Code has a category of; Manufacturing Instruction, Packaging Instruction, Shipping Instruction, or Transfer Instruction.

Routing

The sequence of process codes (steps) required to produce a product.  This is in addition to the current glossary definition that is for BOM only.

The SEMS 4.5 version extends and enhances the Shipping Management capability by providing:

CASE STUDY

By Sherri Telenko - Manfuacturing Automation

October 2004

Parkdale International Limited is part of a volatile industry. Recently, the Hamilton Ont.-based company went from a system that saw shop-floor employees using pen and paper to a fully automated data-and-inventory management software package integrated throughout the entire throughout the entire operation. The upgrading team worked with Toronto-based STEELMAN Software Solutions Inc.

Parkdale’s business is steel, an industry experiencing unprecedented global fluctuations. The company specializes in buying and selling devalued carbon steel products, primarily flat rolled. Extensive evaluation of every shipment is necessary, and often the product is slit or sliced into sheets. But this process isn’t simple.

“We may get a coil that’s 10,000 pounds and a customer wants sheets out of it,” says Stephen Margles, sales manager. Parkdale. “As we are running it out, part way through, we get some bad steel. Our machines are set up to separate the good from the bad and we steel the piles to different customers.” Previously this change was noted on a piece of paper and forwarded to accounitng. The company need a reliable system that would note the input item and divide the cost appropriately between each bundle.

“We put a lot of responsibility on our operations side to do their job properly,” Margles says. “With this software, we’ve given them the tools to do not just the physical labour, but the computer data entry which makes everyone’s job easier.”

Embedded with the Oracle 10g infrastructure software, STEELMAN’s suite of products includes warehouse management, manufacturing control and quality assurance, and it is designed for suppliers and prossors of steel and other metal products. According to Daniel Brody managing director, STEELMAN, “At an integrated mill that does everything, the system will take production from the liquid pot with its chemistry and apply it to the appropriate orders, then move it through the facility based on those orders.”

Other companies sell similar software but Parkdale says it selected STEELMAN because of the service they provide and flexibility of the product, Margles says. “Other companies weren’t as receptive to modifying their systems,” he says.

As with any new automation, the first few months weren’t perfect. The development team need to alter the reports that the system was producing, and servers needed to be coordinated. Margles offers this advice to anyone thinking of implementing a similar process: Don’t start by using parallel systems. “That was a disaster,” he says.

A mid-size company, Parkdale started almost 50 years ago as an extension of a family-run scrap metal business. Today, it is a lean automated operation. In one year, Parkdale went from Flintstone to Jetsons, according to Margles. “We hadn’t been keeping up with technology. Now we have more than we need, but we want to be able to adapt quickly to change.”

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