Overview

For customers who buys products from their oversea vendors, the items they bought are typically loaded up on to the container and put on a freight vessel bound to their destinations.

While this sounds simple, there are a lot of little details associated on getting this done.

A small list of the challenges that companies face are:

• Long lead times
• Multiple orders on a container
• Same items across multiple items on a container
• Managing items on bill of lading
• Depending on Incoterms, the company will take ownership of the items on the water
• Delays

Plus others too numerous to mention.

Standard Business Central Processing

The way standard business central processes purchase order is… by order.

The problem is that a typical manufacturing company from overseas don’t ship by order, they ship by whatever their factory produced. They will try to ship as much of the same item to fulfill across multiple orders as much as possible.

Why do they do this? Efficiency. When you setup a manufacturing line, you want to make as much of that item as possible. Because setup cost is real. In addition, it’s much easier and more optimized to pack the same items on a freight container. You don’t have to play too much Tetris.

This creates a huge conflict on how standard Business Central receives and how manufacturers ship.

To do this out the box, a lot of song a dance will need to be done.

What about Enabling Warehouse Receipt?

You can address some of the problems by enabling the Require Receive in the Location card. You can get the source documents by item to build your Warehouse Receipt. This will allow you to match whatever is on the Bill of Lading.

However, if the Incoterms is FOB, you will need to enable an On the Water location, enable warehousing, manage the transfer order between the On the Water location and the final location. If the final location is also warehouse enabled, it basically creates a lot of additional process that can easily get out of control.

Even without using the On the Water location, most companies may not want to add the complexity of enabling warehousing features for their locations.

Streamline your Overseas Container Management Process

Here’s a quick video describing the process for a company buying goods from their overseas vendors:

Here’s the video of the solution that we created for Dynamics 365 Business Central that helps customers streamline the container management process:

Conclusion

You don’t have to suffer.