Plataan

WMS and Shipping Advice

A few days ago I got a support call which drew my attention to a specific fact when using Warehouse Management Systems (WMS).

Most of you probably know that for a customer, you can decide whether partial shipping is allowed or not. This is done using the field Shipping Advice on the customer card. If you select Complete, NAV will not allow you to do a partial shipment from the sales order.

But what happens if you use WMS?

In the following scenario, we use a customer with Shipping Advice Complete.
Accordingly, when creating a sales order for this customer, the Shipping Advice on the sales header will also be Complete.

The customer orders 2 different items, stored in the same WMS warehouse. For one or the other reason, the user changed the Outbound Warehouse Handling Time on line level for one of the items (exceptionally they need more time for handling this item in the warehouse). As a result, the Planned Shipment Date is different for each item.

In the warehouse, the warehouse manager uses the planned shipment date to create warehouse shipments (in that way, all the items that are to be shipped on a specific date are grouped in 1 warehouse shipment).

In our scenario, we will create a warehouse shipment with a planned shipment date of 25/01/08. This is done using the filter function on the warehouse shipment:

As a consequence, only 1 of the items of our sales order will appear on the warehouse shipment.

Note that we already have a difference between warehouse and sales for what the shipping advice is concerned.
And this will continue because as you will see, it is no problem to create a warehouse pick and to register it.

But when the warehouse pick is registered and the warehouse manager wants to post the warehouse shipment, NAV will check the shipping advice and complain about the complete shipping advice.

What is the solution? First of all, we have to question the fact if it is the intention to make a partial shipment for this customer. We probably haven't set up the customer with shipping advice Complete for no reason.

But let's suppose that we want to do this partial shipment, what do we have to do then?

First step is to go back to the sales order and to reopen it.
Next, we will have to change the Shipping Advice on the sales header to Partial.

When doing this, NAV will ask us if we want to change the shipping advice in the related warehouse documents also.

After choosing Yes, we can go back to the warehouse shipment and post it.

Note that we cannot change the shipping advice on the warehouse shipment. The field doesn't even exits there. The only way to work around it is as described above.

Reporting Services 2008: Placeholder

Something exiting I discovered when using Sql Server Reporting Services 2008 is the placeholder.

What's a placeholder you might think ?

Well, imagine that you are adding a textbox to a report footer and in that textbox you would like to show who executed the report at what time. You can do this by adding a textbox to your report and use an expression behind it to get the required data. The information about who executed the report and at what moment can be found in the Globals collection. Nothing new so far…

When you proudly show your report to the user who requested the report you explain him that at the bottom of the report he can also see who executed it and at what moment. The user is impressed by this and then asks, "Very nice, but could the username and executiontime be in another color then the rest of the txt in that sentence ?" Of course that's no problem you reply.

Now you have to redesign the report and instead of using 1 textbox with 1 expression, you know have to split it up into several textboxes. Why ? Because the data in the textbox has the same layout (font, color,…).

Using a placeholder is a better solution for this problem. A placeholder is like a textbox inside another textbox.

For example you can go into the original textbox and right click:

Then this popup will open:

And here you can enter the text that has to be displayed, even using an expression. And as you can see, there's a Font tab for this Placeholder, so you can assign it it's own Font properties.

For example:

SQL 2008: Reporting Execution Log

Reporting Services stores execution data in several tables in the report server database. Because the internal table structure does not present report execution log data in a format that is accessible to users, a view was created: ExecutionLog. In Sql Server Reporting Services 2008 this view was extended to a new view: ExecutionLog2.

The report server execution log contains information about the reports that execute on the server or on multiple servers in a scale-out deployment. You can use the report execution log to find out how often a report is requested, what formats are used the most, and how many milliseconds of processing time is spent on each processing phase.

If you want to go a step further, you could extract the log data and store it in a separate local report execution log database that you create. This way you could extract data from the ExecutionLog view and store it into a separate database. Then you could create performance & execution related reports on that database.

And here's something great: Microsoft provides you with everything you need to create & implement such a solution, for free !

• All of the sample files used to query and view report execution log data are included in the Reporting Services report samples on the CodePlex site at http://www.CodePlex.com

To view the report server execution log, you can use the following:

• A sample script file called Createtables.sql that creates a new execution log database specifically for viewing log data.
• A sample SQL Server Integration Services package called RSExecutionLog_Update.dtsx that extracts data from the internal report server database and copies it to the sample execution log database that you create.
• A collection of sample reports that retrieves data from the execution log database and displays it in reports that you view on a report server.

Samples reports are also included that retrieve report execution data from the local report execution log database. The reports work with a local database that contains execution log data. Once you create the database, you can run the package to fill it with data, and then run the reports to view information about report activity.

The following files are used together to create the database and extract data:

• RSExecutionLog_Update.dtsx
• RSExecutionLog_Update.dtsConfig
• Createtables.sql

The following sample reports provide information about report server activity:

• Execution Status Codes.rdl
• Report Summary.rdl
• Execution Summary.rdl

Examples: