Question

Create BOL from Order Entry

  • 13 September 2023
  • 3 replies
  • 111 views
N

Currently, to create a BOL we have to manually add the customer id, the ship to id and the order number into the BOL screen to populate our custom form.

One problem we’ve found is that if we add a one-time ship-to to our order, it does not populate to the BOL. We do not save most of our OTST addresses because they are one-time use.

My thought is to add a button to the Order Entry screen to take all the information necessary from that screen and populate the custom BOL document. 

We cannot add it to the shipment screen as the BOL is created before the shipment to send to the carrier to order the truck and the PCID’s are not assigned until the truck arrives.

Has anyone done this or have any tips on accomplishing this? Thank you.

 

Nina

3 replies

M
Userlevel 2

Dear Nina, 

A shame that you cannot take advantage of the auto-generate BOL function, which saves time but requires Customer Shipment Entry first.  I wonder if it would be worth a process change to create (but not mark as shipped) the Customer Shipment Entry, and if that would allow a BOL to be auto-generated from the Actions menu options.

I agree with the idea of prompting the user for the BOL information in the Order Entry screen; you could use UD fields for the info if normal fields are not available for what you need.  Maybe you could make a BOL from a custom format of the sales order acknowledgement; in other words, a report style.  This should get you the address, even if it’s OTST.  Epicor is not build this way.  Shipments can include multiple releases from multiple orders, and bills of lading can include multiple packers I believe.

 

HTH

N

Thank you for your reply.

We talked about entering the shipment but not marking it shipped, but the PCID’s are auto-assigned when the shipment is created, and we don’t want the PCID’s assigned until we are actually pulling the shipment for the truck. 

We started by using the Order Entry screen, but got stuck when we tried to work through one order with multiple shipments, how would we create the BOL then from the Order Entry screen. All the prior information would have to be deleted out and re-entered, or we would have to have multiple fields for each piece of info we need, like BOL1, BOL2, BOL3, etc. 

I don’t understand why the BOL isn’t pulling from anywhere, it seems quite pointless if you have to enter so much information manually. And, having one-time ship-to’s make it impossible to use the BOL, because shipping cannot be tasked with entering the ship to address each time.

M
Userlevel 2

Dear Nina, 

It does pull the info; unfortunately, that source is the pack.  In this screen shot you can see the types of packs available: customer shipments, misc shipments, subcontract shipments and transfer shipments.  The purpose of the BOL (at least normally) is to document what’s in a shipment and how it’s packaged.  Generating a pro-forma BOL before that information is known, you may be telling the customer what you predict will be in each shipment, but until you nail it down in CSE, you are trying to create a BOL for a shipment whose exact contents are not yet known.  Once the pack exists, the shipping address gets pulled automatically into the BOL, even if it’s a one-time address.

I did work for one company that did away with the Epicor generated BOLs altogether.  Instead, they used an alternate form of Sales Order Acknowledgement which included all the legalese to become a BOL.  Another company within the same corporation, the shippers would go online and manually enter the BOL information into an online service and print the resulting document.

Apologies, I have no ideas for doing the advance BOL efficiently.

Best,

..Monty.

 

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