Hi,

This may very fall into a tech question, but since it's related to whs module, i thought of checking with functional guys first, if there is a inbuilt functionality in baan for this issue.

Here's the requirement, we have a Sales Order with 30 as quantity and we have couple of whs which holds this part. We need to basically find out which is the nearest whs location from which we can ship the part from. ( If complete 30 qty is not available in one whs location , then try to search for another nearest whs. location )

Do you know inbuilt functionality to handle this... all we have is whs address and inv. pos. for a part

If not, then i was thinking to somehow utilize some websrvice which is available in cloud.. just thinking a loud. I don't know how realistic is it to utilize that.

-Learner

Hi,

I don't think this can be covered under standard functionality. But you can do a customization where you can keep one field of warehouse table as a Distance Parameter and maintain distance/priority for that warehouse for current company in case where you dont have shared warehouses.

If you have shared warehouses across the companies you can create your own table and maintain distances between companies and warehouses.

I guess, the Warehouse Locations have such setup of using Priorities.

Later use this data within your customization's.

Not sure about the idea of using Web-services for this requirement.

Hi Bhushan,

Thanks for the reply. The reason why i mentioned web services is because the "To location " is not fixed i.e. customer location .

so here's scenario :

Customer is in Dallas, so it should look for nearest whs which could be Louisiana, Houston, instead of California.

The variable in this scenario is Customer location & he could be anywhere so saving the distance in a parameter table may not be able to take care of this scenario. My bad, may be i should given these details in my original post.

Haha. Great. Then you can go for it.

Hope you will have a great time on the "Cloud"! :)

Heard about Infor adapting Cloud as well. Do check if they have something good for you.

All the best.

would be interested to see what you come up with as we have a similar requirement. Please keep us updated.

Sure GaryEd, will update you guys on this.

Learner, did you do anything further with this?

Learner, did you do anything further with this?

We got more detailed business requirement & it seems that our requirement is not going to be so complicated where we end up using webmethods....

Here's what we got... we need to ship parts from location (A) to location (B).


Assuming location (A) is our warehouse(s) and location (B) is our customer. We intend to create a custom table where we would store Location (A) with zone priority.

Refer to this image

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/24/ZIP_Code_zones.svg/1280px-ZIP_Code_zones.svg.png

So effectively we would break our location in various zones & then assign priority like 1st level, 2nd level, 3rd level.

Just as an example If u see the above image Texas ( Pink block ) has been divided into 4 diff. zip code zones, so we would prioritize that let's say

Zip code 716-729 : 1st priority
Zip code 75-79 : 2nd priority
Zip code 700-715 : 3rd priority
Zip code 73-74 : 4th priority

Since we are dealing with very few customers. This table is manageable. Had there been 1000's of customers with 100s of whs like a Amazon model, i would think this as not so neat of a solution , in that case webmethods would have been better option.

If you are inclined to use webmethod, then what u can do is, through baan program call java program ( via run.prog function of baan ) and this java program should be responsible to invoke required webmethods assuming Start and End Destination address is passed to Java program & then determine which whs. is the closest. I am not a webmethod expert, but came to know that google & yahoo has some free api available which u can use to get this info, however i see internet speed / delay in response as an issue with this approach, if u r going to access this from public cloud.

Hope this gives you some pointers.

Hi,
There is one more solution you can do. UPS has zone table for each service. So say if you download UPS Ground zone table into your system and used it find out the nearlest location it may serve your purpose. The zoe table is defined from ship from zip to ship to zips.

Arvind Patil