Dynamics GP used at the Trade Counter

This implementation of Dynamics GP had some new challenges. The company have a trade counter at the front of the warehouse, thus they needed a solution to allow entering of orders, picking and fulfilling them and presenting an invoice to the customer all as the customer waits. As this was trade, customers need invoices to take away with the goods.

Workflow

The workflow has ended up like this;

  • Customer goes to trade counter
  • Trade counter staff work with customer to enter the items they require on to an invoice SOP type document in Dynamics GP. There is no need for a sales order as the items will not be back ordered. If this is required the back ordered items can be pushed through to an order.
  • Send the invoice to the warehouse batch to allow the warehouse pick printing service to print off the pick list and maintain the integrity of the pick by locking access to the document.
  • Staff pick the items for the invoice.
  • Goods arrive at the counter, customer agrees it is all they want - customers have an annoying tendency to change their mind or want to add stuff to the invoice.
    If they add stuff or change stuff on the order, the invoice is recalled from the warehouse batch, changes made and a new edition of the pick list is printed by submitting it to the warehouse batch again.
  • Once everyone is happy, the sales order processing fulfilment module I wrote fulfills the order, recording it is of collect type, defaults the picker, packer and checker names and prints delivery notes, one for the customer to sign the other for the counter records, it also prints invoices as required for the customer to take away.

PDF versions of all the documents invoice, pick lists, despatch notes, as usual are all automatically stored on the document server for later viewing or reprinting or web server serving as required.

Often the telesales team or the website will take orders that are for customer collect, these are dealt with by transferring them to invoice as the customer arrives at the counter, and otherwise the process remains the same.

Order intake statistics

This concept of receiving sales orders in to invoice type documents breaks one of the business rules that our reporting uses for establishing order intake. Previously this analysis was done merely on sales orders. Thus some work on the Business Intelligence was required to work out what constituted a genuine order intake document, indeed line and what was just part of the process document flow. i.e. don't count an invoice created from a sales order as order intake, unless any lines were added to the invoice by editing the invoice after the transfer, in this case they need to be counted. I've avoided having to write this report, frankly that is great as I can get on with some more process improvements.

Quick and smooth picking of goods

This solution seems to be an improvement on the previous ERP system that was in use and I intend to make some more changes to the fulfilment software to improve it further.

Reporting services used to produce invoices via XML web services

I used reporting services, in an attempt to move away from the Crystal that comes with .NET. I had to call the report from a windows service and from the .NET application but as the invoice can be subject to many changes during the early days while things are settling in, I chose to use a reporting services server to print the invoices. This ensures that any changes to the report end up reflected on both the invoices produced automatically from the fulfilment software and those produced in batches for other orders where the invoices are posted. I used the web services API to invoke printing of the report. More about that in the next blog post. The speed of invoice printing is not quite what I would like at the moment by using this method, but we have not looked at all at optomising the server or code yet so I am confident improvements will soon follow.