Automatic order drop

Dropping orders automatically expedites the order processing workflow and eliminates the requirement for you to review orders and manually drop the orders. After you establish the rules for automatically dropping orders, orders that qualify to be dropped to the floor are identified by the system.

Based on the predefined timing parameters, the orders are dropped automatically without human intervention. The auto-drop process does not allow you to allocate inventory for RM purchase orders, so RM POs are excluded from automatic order dropping.

Building the rule is the most important phase of using automatic order dropping. When creating rules, consider your schedules for receiving inventory, putting away, replenishment, manpower allocation, carrier schedules, and resource allocation.

To build the rule, a rudimentary knowledge of Progress syntax is required for anything more than simple criteria entry. The criteria you specify is used to build a query statement that is used to find orders that meet the criteria specified.

The query statement built first attempts to find orders that are: a) in the company you are logged into, b) in the warehouse the rule was created for, and c) have not been assigned to be picked. The orders that meet those conditions, based upon the criteria you specify for the rule, are reviewed by the system.

In Auto Drop Rule, the Field Name field next to the Criteria field can be used to look up fields on the ORDHDR database table. These fields can be used in the criteria. Selecting a field from the lookup adds the word 'AND' and adds the field name selected to any existing criteria text. You must indicate how that field is used.

When a rule is saved, the criteria on that rule is used to build a query statement. That query is tested to determine if the rule can be executed. If the rule can be executed without errors, you are presented with a results window. The results indicate how many orders were found by the query and the actual query logic that was run to find them. If the query could not be executed, the results window shows the query logic that was attempted. It also shows any error message that resulted from attempting to execute the query. If the query could not be executed, any changes that are made to the rule are not saved. The criteria must result in a valid query before the rule can be saved.