Occasionally when working with Lanham Pack Line Scanning for Dynamics NAV a single item needs to be shipped in two (or more) separate packages. In this blog post I’ll offer two solutions to this issue.
Solution 1 – Empty Package
This can be achieved using the create extra package command (//CEP) which will create an “empty” Package record. For example:
- Open order
- Scan item
- Close package
- Create empty package (//CEP)
- Close package
- Close order
A drawback of solution 1 is that the empty package won’t have any package lines and won’t be associated with any items.
Solution 2 – Part Quantities
Another solution is to manipulate the item quantity on the package to only assign part of the item. For example packing a single NAV item in two packages could be done with a quantity of 0.5 in each package:
- Open order
- Scan item
- Open Package Card
- Change quantity to 0.5
- Close package
- Scan item again (This will display over pack warning)
- Open Package Card
- Change quantity to 0.5
- Close package
- Close order
This solution has a few more steps, but will result in the package being associated with an item.
We have tried Solution #1. It does not appear to be supported in the ASN. We can Release the BOL and Release Summary. However, when we click Send ASN we get an error message. The error message reads “Sales Shipment Line not found for Package Item.”.
Thanks for bringing that up Mark, I wasn’t using the EDI module then so didn’t hit that issue. Did option 2 work?
We haven’t tried the second solution. We do not like the idea of using a decimal value. If there were 3 packages total I think we would have to be careful with what decimal value we used so that the combination equaled 1 (.3 + .3 + .4 = 1). In addition, the ASN would show the decimal values and likely cause some confusion. We are thinking of writing code to insert a new shipment and package to handle this issue. We would setup a generic item to be used on the package and shipment. The generic item would not be added to the sales lines. We would likely not associate these additional packages with the BOL preventing them from showing on the ASN. We have not tested this, so I am not sure what issues we may be confronted with.
We do appreciate your posts on the subject. It is disappointing that there is not more information available on Lanham’s E-Ship.
Yeah it’s a fair point, option 2 is messy. I went for option 1 myself as we only needed the total number of packages for a custom carrier interface we’d developed. The interface didn’t care what was in each package. This was really a workaround as the customer didn’t want to use BOMs, which I guess is how Lanham envisioned this would work. Thanks for your comments.