Custom Shipping Solution
I am trying to customize NS to handle our shipping. We buy items for people overseas and have SF containers going out every few months. We receive these items into inventory and put them in a bin that corresponds to the country of destination. We also allow customers to order items themselves and have them sent to us and these also go into these bins. When we have enough cargo for a country we load the items into a container. How should I go about keeping track of the items that we do not buy? We really only care about the volume of the box and customs value. We would then distribute the total shipping charge per the volume of their items. We typically have around 50 customers
You could create packages that correspond to each item but NS packages don’t really apply to the cubic volume information you need. If it was me, I would try building custom fields with the LxWxH and total cubic volume for each item. Include one for the weight as well. Then, you could put together reports and saved searches that tell you the total quantity of items, total value, total cubic volume, and total weight of each bin. You could even have alerts on some of them to alert you when a certain bin is reaching capacity of the shipping container. (a 40 ft high cube is around 2,700 cubic feet). That being said… just because you are around the right cubic feet for the container does not mean you will be able to pack it efficiently to fill then entire thing. This would be something that gets you in the ball park and then you have to bring it home with some leg work.
You could also have reports/searches that show you the total volume/weight of each item in the bin, thus enabling you to break down percentage of real estate that each customer is consuming.
Hope this gets you started.
My feeling is that your Netsuite model needs to reflect the real world. You would need some custom tables to represent what you have
SF Containers are a custom record which will have dimensions, references, end locations, your goods being added, customer goods being added. I’m thinking this is a manifest list onto which you are adding lines.
Customer goods also are custom records or a sub table of a SF Container so you can add these to the volume.
Some maths to calculate your total container volume minus your goods volume minus third party volume.
Look at what you have now and model it in Netsuite. I have seen SuiteApps which help with optimising containers but not sure if it directly applies here.
