Sage 100

Sage 100c v2017.1 - I have a customer where they make heavy use of serialized inventory for electronic items. These serial numbers are not really used for anything except which customer received the item. (IE - It's not like food processing where we are tracking potential bad food). Presently we are applying the serial # label when the item is completed (via BOM). What they would like to do is instead of applying the labels during BOM production they would like to apply the labels during shipping. Part of the reason is to speed up the picking process so that someone isn't looking through a pile of finished goods at tiny serial numbers. Obviously, we'd have to print labels along with the picking sheets and have our warehouse people apply the label. Have you ever had this request (to apply S/N during shipping instead of production entry)? And if so, any gotchas? Does either Scanco or Scanforce do a better/worse job of allowing for this (aka label printing)? This doesn't seem

So they would be selecting the serial numbers they want to ship via Sales Order Entry?

How are you going to ship the serial numbers if they don't already exist in inventory? Unless you pre-allocate the serial number on the SO before printing the pick sheet and after production has been entered? Then your pick sheet would have the designated numbers. You still need to figure out how to print labels at the time of the pick sheet so the shipper could peel them off and affix to the part before boxing it up.

Assigning Serials can be done during SO (option). In this case (not true for all use of Lot/Serial) the SN tracking is more to track the customer who bought it. They work with a lot of resellers and on occasion, an end user calls with a defective part and being able to look up who the customer (aka reseller). They are ok with building the items and assigning SN ahead of time since there's really no need to track except once the items are sold.

This customer request is coming up again. Apparently, they think it's a really really great idea to attach the serial # label at the time of shipment (as opposed to when the serialized item is put on the shelf as inventory). Personally, I think this is going to be awesome until the first shipment goes out with 50 items lacking any type of serial number label. But what do I know. It looks like Scanforce and Scanco both offer label printing. Do you have any customers who use the label printing **at the point of shipment?** In this case, we'd assign the S/N at the time the SO is generated. That part is no big deal. Then warehouse person would slap the S/N label on the appropriate item ( I predict that this will happen accurately 80% of the time and the remaining 20% will go without labels because of some emergency rush shipment but I hope to be pleasantly surprised). I'm thinking that either: a. A Crystal Form prints the labels as part of the original form or b. (preferred) Label printing from either Scanforce or Scanco takes over and prints the label to a special printer. I'd rather not put myself in the middle of revamping the form to get it to spit out correctly sized labels and would prefer to use a canned solution for the label printing provided it's reasonable and does what this customer says they want. If you have had to do this before. Attempted to do this before or can think of other things that might go wrong (other than operator errors) I'd welcome the feedback.

So are these fictitious S/N? Still not understanding how you are assigning a S/N at the time of order if the S/N does not exist in inventory.

The serial exists. There is just no label on the item. They want to print the label at the time they pull the item. I think the confusion is what purpose does the SN serve. It's sole purpose is to identify what item was shipped to what customer. They use this for warranty work and identifying what customer purchased the item. They work through resellers so the SN is also an identifier of which reseller bought (and resold) the item.

They create the serialized item in BOM production entry. It goes on the shelf. Someone buys it. At the point of shipping they want to slap the label for whatever SN is showing on the sales order. Right now they are labeling it before it goes on the shelf. They just want to label it at time of shipment. Again, in not recommending this workflow. It's something they believe will speed up their process.

How about a modified Picking Sheet that is a label?

I like the picking sheet idea. I have some concerns they're going to have different sized labels or I'm going to screw around forever with alignment and fonts. But the pick sheet might work.

There's a sneaky way to print as many labels as you have Qty in a Crystal report. I use a WO form as a label for a mfg firm doing the same sort of thing.

I also think they are going to have employees forget to label the item and then have no way to practically identify. The other issue is they may ship 6 different items. Only one of them may be serialized. Now they need to remember which one gets the label. Good luck with this when your shipping clerk is on vacation for two weeks. It sounds like an easy concept but I fear in practice it will be error prone.

The picking sheet could look at the Valuation method and determine which lines should get labels

I have a client printing labels at time of shipment data entry after each one . We are using the ScanForce label program. We create a file with label info (item, lot, qty)in a monitored folder. ScanForce reads it and immediately prints a label. We are doing it with custom programming but scripting could do the same thing

@JimWoodhead Is this a standard part or did you guys make a custom enhancement?

we sold them the ScanForce label printing and in this case we wrote a custom piece for them to create the label file. . It is likely under $1500 to develop script or Custom enhancement. but it was custom not standard.