Questions on drop shipments

[Antoni Ten Monrós]

I've realized that iDempiere won't allow you to generate shipments for drop shipment sales orders (adds "    AND o.IsDropShip='N'" to the SQL query in InOutGenerate). I assume that the idea is that in this case, you tell your vendor to ship directly to your customer, and so there is no material movement on your side. Drop Ship Business Partner is thus your supplier? If so, why does by default the filter for Drop Ship Business Partner only allow you to select customers?

On purchase orders, is the Drop Ship Business Partner your customer that your supplier should deliver directly to? then why does it filter to vendors only?

When running OrderPOCreate, IF you pass the IsDropShip=true parameter, and the selected sales order is not drop ship, it will set the drop ship partner of the purchase order to to the sales order business partner. However, if the sales order is a drop ship order, it will set the drop ship business partner of the purchase order to the sales order drop ship partner. This suggests that the drop ship busness partner on both the sales order and the purchase order should be customers, right?

What if your customer requests a drop shipment, that is, that you ship directly to a third party (your customer's customer)? In this case, the items to ship are in your warehouse, BUT you are shipping them to a party that is not your customer? You must send order confirmations and invoices to your actual customer, but shipments should go to the third party. In this case, you can not generate the shipments with either Generate Shipments nor Generate Shipments (manual), and when you create the shipment manually, the shipment business partner is the order's business partner, AND the shipment is not marked as a drop shipment, nor is the drop shipment partner from the order copied to the shipment, meaning that by default it goes to your customer. Is this a bug?

Is there anywhere on the wiki where proper use of drop shipments is explained? I would prefer not having to reverse engineer the code to understand what's happening. If there isn't, could someone explain it to me, so a proper wiki page could be created?

[Antoni Ten Monrós]

Ok, CarlosRuiz on IRC, pointed me to http://www.adempiere.com/Sponsored_Development:_Drop_Ship but it seems that this was never implemented, or at least not completely implemented, as it seems that it's still the case that only use case 1: Simple Customer Drop Ship is implemented (the functionality that was inherited from Compiere), while my needs align closer to use case 3: Customer Drop Ship. That's what I get from reading the code and the sponsored development linked above.

I have created a Jira ticket so this gets some attention here (https://idempiere.atlassian.net/browse/IDEMPIERE-2620)

[Steven Sackett]

Hi Antoni

I think there was a lot of work done after the wiki post and the drop-ship functionality was used successfully in a production system.  The code for it is publicly available.  It was mainly focussed on requesting a supplier to deliver directly to a customer of the Adempiere system user.

As I remember...

Products were flagged as available by dropshipment.

A drop-ship warehouse was created for each Org requiring drop ship.

The SO line would have the warehouse changed automatically to drop ship if the product was flagged as 'drop ship only'

Create PO from SO would create drop-ship POs with all the drop-ship instructions to the supplier.

Some document .. probably an invoice would be received from the supplier so we knew he had shipped the goods..

This document would be used to trigger creation of a Vendor Material Receipt in the drop-ship warehouse.

This receipt would automatically create a customer shipment and then a customer invoice.

The supplier invoice would be processed when received.

The drop-ship warehouse would now be empty and all the accounting would be complete.

The issues you raised in your original post must have been addressed because the system was quite heavily used and without any show stopper problems.

The work was done for this case ... http://www.adempiere.com/Complex_Distribution_System:_Case_Study  but I expect the link to the code will be expired.

If it is the sort of thing you are interested in then I am sure it can be tracked down.

I think we were only interested in the case of ordering for direct delivery to our customer.  The other case of receiving a PO and then sending a delivery directly on behalf of our customer to his customer using his logo etc was never implemented.

regards

steven 

[Antoni Ten Monrós]

On Monday, May 18, 2015 at 3:10:40 PM UTC+2, Steven Sackett wrote:

Hi Antoni

I think there was a lot of work done after the wiki post and the drop-ship functionality was used successfully in a production system.  The code for it is publicly available.  It was mainly focussed on requesting a supplier to deliver directly to a customer of the Adempiere system user.

Hi Steven
Indeed, the functionality to have the supplier deliver directly to the customer is there, but that only covers use case 1 from the wiki post. Cases 2 and 3 are not in the code as far as I could find. If they were developed, and the code was released but not merged, then I would love to find it, to see if I could reuse some part of it, and if it's still compatible with current iDempiere.
 

The issues you raised in your original post must have been addressed because the system was quite heavily used and without any show stopper problems.

The work was done for this case ... http://www.adempiere.com/Complex_Distribution_System:_Case_Study  but I expect the link to the code will be expired.

If it is the sort of thing you are interested in then I am sure it can be tracked down.

I think we were only interested in the case of ordering for direct delivery to our customer.  The other case of receiving a PO and then sending a delivery directly on behalf of our customer to his customer using his logo etc was never implemented.

I'll give it a look, the links seem to lead to active downloads. Thanks.

As I see, it was done as a customization.jar, while AFAIU, the right way to handle this in iDempiere is as a series of plug-ins, with their packouts, separated by function, so it's not directly reusable, but translating it to iDempiere should not be impossible (the fact that the database modifications are provided as a modified seed database instead of a packout or a set if migration scripts will require more work, but it's not unfeasible). Of course, if the "ship to customer's customer" was not handled, I would get limited use out of it.

regards

steven