Purchase Order

A purchase order in 3PL Dynamics WMS is the announcement of goods that a customer expects to arrive in your warehouse: the customer items and quantities the customer announces for inbound. The actual inbound is registered on a Receipt that is created from one or more purchase orders. Every receipt line keeps a link to the purchase order line(s) it was created from, so the quantities you receive and post are reported back on the purchase order.

From purchase order to receipt

There are two ways to turn purchase order lines into receipt lines:

Create Receipt on the Purchase Order Card or on the Purchase Order List (3PL). This creates a new receipt for the purchase order, or adds the purchase order lines to an existing receipt.
Functions > Get Purchase Order Lines on the lines of an existing Receipt. This opens a selection of purchase order lines of the receipt's sell-to customer; the lines you select are added to the receipt, by default for the quantity that is still outstanding.

Tip

With Use Advanced Purchase Order Filter on the Order Type Card of the receipt, the purchase order lines offered by Get Purchase Order Lines are additionally filtered by sender address and adjusted for quantities that were already received.

By default every purchase order line becomes its own receipt line. If several purchase orders for the same customer item arrive in one shipment, you can let the system merge them into one receipt line; see Consolidate purchase order lines.

Quantities on the purchase order lines

On the lines of the purchase order, Quantity Created shows how much of the line has been placed on receipt lines and Quantity Posted shows how much of it has been posted on those receipt lines. The quantities are counted per purchase order line, also when two lines of the same purchase order are linked to the same receipt line.

When one receipt line is linked to several purchase order lines, the posted quantity is distributed over the linked purchase order lines in the order in which they were linked: the first purchase order line is filled up to its quantity, the remainder goes to the next one, and so on. A shortage therefore always ends up on the last linked purchase order line. What happens with a surplus depends on the setting described in Over-delivery on linked purchase orders.

Consolidate purchase order lines

A customer regularly announces several purchase orders with the same customer item that arrive in one shipment, and you make one receipt for them. Without consolidation this gives one receipt line per purchase order line. On the scanner the warehouse employee cannot see which receipt line belongs to which purchase order, picks one line and registers all handling units on it. The received total is right, but the quantities per purchase order are not.

To merge such lines, enable Consolidate Purchase Order Lines on the Order Type Card of the order type you use for the receipt. You find the option on the FastTab Document Settings under Show more, directly below Use Advanced Purchase Order Filter. The option is off by default, so existing order types keep their current behaviour.

With the option enabled, both Create Receipt and Functions > Get Purchase Order Lines add a purchase order line to an existing receipt line of the same receipt that was created from a purchase order, instead of creating a new line, when all of the following are identical (an empty value only matches an empty value):

customer item and unit of measure;
order unit of measure;
handling unit type;
condition set and selection criteria set;
location, building, sell-to customer and ship-to address;
batch and external batch;
expiration date and production date;
attributes 1 to 10.

Note

The handling unit type is still called Carrier Type on the document line and in the ToolTip of the option; Carrier is the older name for Handling Unit (see WMS Carrier renamed).

The external document number is deliberately not part of this comparison: lines of different purchase orders are merged even though every purchase order has its own external document number.

The result is one receipt line with the summed quantity, linked to all purchase order lines it was built from. The order quantity of the merged line is recalculated in its order unit of measure, for example 24 pieces with an order unit of a box of 12 gives an order quantity of 2. Scanner users register the handling units on that single line and no longer have to choose a purchase order line; the posted quantity is distributed over the linked purchase order lines as described above.

Good to know:

The option is read from the order type of the receipt, not from the order type of the purchase order.
Only lines of the document type Purchase Order are merged. Lines of Transport and Import Sea documents that you create a receipt for are always created as separate receipt lines.
Posting of the receipt is unchanged: the detail lines are posted as before, so there is still one Put Away activity per posted handling unit.
This option is independent of the Consolidate Lines setting of the Grouping Criteria, which merges lines of the same customer item when receipts are grouped. Grouped receipts behave as before.

Over-delivery on linked purchase orders

The setting Allow Over Delivery On Purchase Order on Warehouse Setup (3PL) (FastTab Posting Settings, group Receipt) decides what happens when a receipt line that is linked to more than one purchase order line is posted for more than the total of those lines; see also Warehouse Setup.

Enabled: the surplus is assigned to the last linked purchase order line. The posted quantity of that line exceeds its ordered quantity, so its outstanding quantity becomes negative.
Disabled: the purchase order lines are filled up to their own quantity and the surplus is not assigned to any purchase order line, as before.

This applies to every receipt line with more than one linked purchase order line, so also to receipt lines merged by the Consolidate Lines setting of the Grouping Criteria, not only to lines merged with Consolidate Purchase Order Lines.

Example

A customer announces purchase order 1 with 100 pieces of item A001 and purchase order 2 with 150 pieces of the same item; both lines have the same units, location, customer and ship-to address and no batch, dates or attributes. With Consolidate Purchase Order Lines enabled on the order type of the receipt, Create Receipt or Get Purchase Order Lines gives one receipt line of 250 pieces linked to both purchase order lines.

Quantity posted on the receipt line	Purchase order 1 (100)	Purchase order 2 (150)
200 (50 short)	100 posted, 0 outstanding	100 posted, 50 outstanding
300 (50 too many), over-delivery allowed	100 posted, 0 outstanding	200 posted, -50 outstanding
300 (50 too many), over-delivery not allowed	100 posted, 0 outstanding	150 posted, 0 outstanding; 50 not assigned

With Consolidate Purchase Order Lines disabled, the same two purchase orders give two receipt lines of 100 and 150 pieces, each linked to its own purchase order line.

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