Shipment Performance Overview

In a highly competitive marketplace, the ability to meet performance and required ship dates is an essential element in an effective supply chain. Companies need detailed shipment information to improve their current processes and remain competitive.

In some industries, companies are required to comply with performance criteria in order to continue in a business relationship. Well-defined metrics are needed to meet regulatory and quality standards.

With the Shipment Performance module, you can monitor shipping effectiveness by measuring how a shipping department meets customer- requested ship dates and quantities. You can choose which date to use for measuring performance based on your business practices: the line-item performance date, due date, or required date.

You can collect shipment performance data for a wide variety of shipment types including discrete and scheduled sales orders, return material authorizations (RMA), distribution orders, and material orders. Performance is measured by comparing planned ship dates and quantities to actual ship dates and quantities. Using these comparisons, the system automatically assigns two types of predefined status codes to shipments:

• Status codes that measure timeliness of shipments are called time-based status codes. These codes measure timeliness based on hours or days a shipment is early or late.

• Status codes that measure the completeness of shipments are called quantity-based status codes. These codes measure the shipment quantity or percentage either over or under the required shipment quantity.

You can optionally add reason codes to each performance transaction record. You can enter further information on status code and reason code assignment and related issues as comments. For additional tracking, you can specify categories for all shipment line items.

Example: Shipment transactions that are fed through your company’s warehouse system will be delayed one day due to unexpected freeway closure. You can define a time-based status code for a one-day delay and a related reason code using shiptime as the reason type and Traffic as the reason code. Shipper personnel at the warehouse use Pre-Shipper/Shipper Workbench (2.9.2) to enter the Traffic reason code during the actual shipper transaction to indicate why shipment timeliness is impacted. In the Comments field, they can enter specific information about the delay.

You can also use Shipment Performance with Change Tracking Maintenance (36.2.22). You can track changes to line item details in Sales Order Maintenance (7.1.1), such as when the due date or quantity changes.

Shipment performance reports and the information they provide can improve shipping processes by letting you monitor shipping efficiency at one or more sites. Multiple reports are available, including a performance report for reviewing the timeliness and completeness of shipments.

Shipment performance reports support pareto analysis. This type of analysis is based on the idea that only a vital few factors are responsible for producing most problems. The principle can be applied to shipment improvement by determining the few key problems that cause a majority of the problems (80%). These reports can help your company comply with industry standards that require shipment performance analysis.

Also available are item, customer, and reason code analysis reports for reviewing the timeliness and completeness of shipments based on items shipped, customers shipped to, and reason codes assigned. You can optionally export shipment performance data for use with external reporting systems.

Note: Shipment Performance Reporting is an element of the QAD PRO/PLUS functionality. Other PRO/PLUS elements include: