Pre-advices are a way of letting the warehouse know what goods they will receive from your suppliers.

Overview

Vision EDI has the ability to accept Pre-Advice notifications from customers, this may more commonly be known as the customers “Purchases” from suppliers or “Purchase Orders”.

The facility allows the transmission of pre-advice information in advance of the goods arriving thus allowing the warehouse to plan resources more efficiently and effectively.

A by-product of this is the timely receipt of goods when they arrive at the warehouse and the establishment of a single source for all information, such as product description and information.

Operation

It is envisaged that customers will transmit the pre-advice once the order is confirmed and this may be at the point of shipping especially on deep sea orders. From this we can then generate new product codes without the need to receive a seperate product transmission.

This pre-advice can be updated, by presenting the entire order again however:

Updates allow customers to manipulate incoming products, in particular reserve customer stocks up to the point of receipt in the warehouse.

Once the booking is made updates are not possible from EDI updates, the goods inwards team will update / modify the existing pre-advice and may request new product codes if the products are different.

The goods receipt will reflect the actual receipt even if it is different to the advised quantities.

Incoming Deliveries

We would expect that hauliers and shippers would book their goods into the warehouse using the purchase order number.

A future enhancement will the design of a haulier / shipper interface to allow this process to be completed online by the haulier / shipper.

Part Deliveries

These will be allowed if the pre-advice has been marked as part delivery when it is received, if not once the booking has been made the pre-advice will be marked as completed and no further bookings will be allowed.

In the case of part deliveries being allowed, the pre-advice will remain open for a further 4 weeks from the date of the first delivery in anticipation of the next delivery, if this does not take place then the pre-advice  will be considered closed and marked accordingly.

Limitations

The maximum file size for which this service 2Mb. No files were tested beyond this size as it is not common to receive a file bigger than this size for pre-advices.

This size should allow approximately 2500 pre-advice lines to be sent in a single file.

Amendments can only be made if:

• The vehicle has not arrived yet.

• The check sheet has not been printed by the warehouse.

• The rotation number or location are not specified in the file.

Transmission of Files

Customers have three options for transmitting the data to the warehouse.

1. Electronic Format direct from customers system by any one of the approved methods of transmission shown on the sales system.

1. Manual keying by the customer on the Vision CIS website.

1. By faxing the information to the warehouse to enable the warehousekeeper to key the pre-advice onto the system.

File Naming Convention

The file will be made of four parts.

Prefix with PA -> Date of PA -> PO Number. <Customer_code>    
PAyymmdd_hhmmss_<number>.<customer code>

e.g PA051214_123204_00001.ABCD1234

KEY:

YY = year       MM = month of the year                   DD = day of month

hh = hour        mm = Minutes past the hour ss = seconds 

The customer code for the filename would normally be the same code as used in the customer code field of the order file, although we can accept a file which contains orders for multiple customer accounts.