Wednesday, March 12, 2014

SOP Orders imported with eConnect auto allocate and auto fulfill

By Steve Endow

I received a call from a customer who has an eConnect application to import SOP orders.  The import was developed by another partner many years ago, and I inhereted it for ongoing support.  It has been working fine, but the client is changing their warehouse processes, and they want to use a separate fulfillment process for the imported orders.

No problem, except that the orders imported with eConnect  were automatically coming into GP as allocated and fulfilled, so they wanted to turn that off.  I checked the code for the eConnect import, and it was not set to auto allocate, and it was not specifying a quantity fulfilled on the line items, so I assumed it must be an option in GP.  But we then checked the Order setup options in GP, and it was properly setup to use a separate fulfillment process.

And to confirm that the issue was with the import, they manually entered an order, and it did not automatically fulfill.

I was puzzled.

We checked the GP settings again, and I checked the code again, but I still didn't see what was causing the fulfillment.

I then went back to the eConnect Help file and started searching for "fulfill".  Behold, on the taSopLineIvcInsert schema page, the word "fulfill" showed up on the DOCID field.  And to my surprise, here is what it says:

 Document ID; if left blank, line will autoallocate and fulfill

Huh, go figure.  Even though the DOCID was being specified at the Order Header, if you don't specify it at the line level as well, those lines will auto allocate and auto fulfill.

I checked the GP 2013 eConnect documentation, and it's the same.

That type of defaulting (to no Doc ID) would have never occurred to me, and seems a little odd.  I would have thought that the lines would default to the Doc ID used by the header, but apparently not.  This would explain the issue the customer was seeing.

After all the work that I've done with eConnect, I would thought I would have been aware of that--maybe I knew it at one point but forgot--but it's just another example of the depth and detail involved in ERP systems.  I continue to learn new things regularly...


Steve Endow is a Dynamics GP Certified Trainer and Dynamics GP Certified IT Professional in Los Angeles.  He is also the owner of Precipio Services, which provides Dynamics GP integrations, customizations, and automation solutions.

You can also find him on Google+ and Twitter


4 comments:

Mohammad R. Daoud said...

I been through the same this morning. You saved me hours of researching!

I read this comment in the eConnect Schema Reference, but didn't think that this could be the reason, very wired approach of implementing something!

Unknown said...

So i been trying to the opposite and have the order auto allocate and fulfill in econnect but haven't been able to figure it out. I have created a new sales order Order ID and have left the "Use Separate Fulfillment Process" unchecked. In the Econnect xml i have also specified the below values. Any ideas of what im missing so this could work?

.QtyTBaor = 10--thats just an example but quantity can be whatever
.AUTOALLOCATELOT = 0
.ALLOCATE = 1

Steve Endow said...

Hi slmofo83,

Based on my experience that I noted in the post, eConnect does seem to have the ability to automatically allocate, so I don't know why it isn't working for you.

Did you try leaving the DOCID blank at the line item level? In that situation, eConnect should automatically allocate. You might try that and see if it works. And then if you have to selectively allocate lines, try adding the DOCID value to some lines.

Unknown said...

I had this problem for a week or two now and couldn't figure it out. Went through the same process you did. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction, it now works as designed :)