DOM: How does chained order consolidation work?

Answer

Product provides two ways to consolidate chained orders -- chained order consolidation template and YFSDetermineChainedOrderForConsolidationUE

Q. When is the consolidation template used?

A. The template is used to consolidate order lines on the same sales order to a chained order. For example, there might be scenarios where the customer would like to consolidate order lines based on the delivery date or ship nodes. Consider there are five lines on an order and none of those items are available at the ship node. Three lines on that order had a ReqShipDate = 21-10-2009 and the remaining had a ReqShipDate = 12-10-2009. If the consolidation criterion was the ReqShipDate, then scheduling that order will result in two chained orders getting created. One for the lines with ReqShipDate as 21-10-2009 and the other order has lines with ReqShipDate as 12-10-2009. Attributes need to be included in the template for the system to consider them for consolidation.

Q. When is the YFSDetermineChainedOrderForConsolidationUE used?

A. The YFSDetermineChainedOrderForConsolidationUE must be implemented to consolidate order lines from different sales order to a single chained order. If the user exit is not implemented, then a new chained order is created. Example: Consider the scenario where an order SO1 came in today at 10 AM and a chained order CO1 got created for the same. Now another order SO2 is placed at 2PM but the vendor from whom this order needs to be fulfilled happens to be same as SO1. So instead of creating a new chained order, this order SO2 can be consolidated to CO1 itself as for both SO1 and SO2 the vendor matches.

For more information about the user exit, please refer the API Javadocs.

Q: If the user exit is implemented, then is all the determination logic custom?

A. The UE implementation can be completely customized.

However in case of drop ship scenarios, an additional problem needs to be taken care of as well. The functionality of propagating the status change back to sales order once the drop ship order is shipped. This one might not be handled by the system. In such a case, a listener can be configured in the sales order pipeline, to listen to the status of drop ship order and then make a status change if the drop ship order is shipped.