For businesses that manage the transportation of products, a distribution planner needs the ability to review upcoming shipments and use this information to schedule the necessary delivery activities. As changes are made to pending shipments, the planner must be able to quickly adjust the related deliveries. The Food Manufacturing & Distribution distribution planning application provides several tools to help you plan, manage, and record your delivery activities.
The key component of the distribution planning application is the delivery trip management functionality. Use this feature to group outbound shipments together into activities called delivery trips. You can create delivery trips manually or generate them automatically according to predefined delivery routes travelled by company vehicles. Depending on the level of control a company requires, activities such as picking and truck loading may be recorded as part of each delivery trip.
Additional features let a company further maximize efficiency throughout the distribution planning process. Pickup loads let you coordinate the retrieval of purchase orders from vendor locations. For customers who place the same sales orders regularly, define standing orders to streamline the creation of these transactions.
The following table describes a sequence of activities, with links to the topics that describe them. These activities are listed in the order in which they are generally performed.
To | See |
|---|---|
Organize the procurement of several purchases into a single pickup activity. | |
Set up standing orders to process recurring sales requests from customers. | |
Create and process delivery trips. | |
Create a link between transfer routes and delivery routes for automatic assignment of transfer orders to delivery trips. |