This activity is used to print a delivery note as soon as a quantity of a source line is connected to the shipment i.e., a shipment line is created. The delivery note is used to accompany the goods to the receiver and is considered as a preliminary document when it is printed before the shipment has been completed. If the delivery note is printed very early in the shipment process, e.g., before picking is reported, it cannot be considered as final since it is not possible to retrieve accurate information of the delivery at that stage. When the shipment is in Preliminary status, the connected source quantity will be shown as the delivered quantity since this is what is planned to be delivered.
When the shipment is in Complete status, if there is any quantity that is actually delivered, that will be shown as the delivered quantity in the delivery note, else the picked quantity will be shown as the delivery note quantity. For non-inventory parts, the non inventory quantity to be delivered will be shown as the delivery note delivered quantity. Furthermore, if the delivery note is printed before a handling unit structure has been defined, this will result in information on the tare, gross weight, and volume not being presented on the document.
This activity can be executed either manually per shipment, manually for all shipments connected to a consolidated shipment or automatically in the shipment flow. Whether or not to print a delivery note automatically, is controlled by the shipment type of the shipment. In the shipment type it can be defined that a delivery note should be printed at execution of a main activity in the shipment flow e.g. reservation, report picking, delivery. A consolidated shipment is defined as one departure of several shipments from the specified site, to all the delivery addresses of the connected shipments. When executed from the consolidated shipment the delivery notes for all connected shipments are printed in reversed load sequence order to get the delivery notes in unloading order.
The calculation of gross weight and volume requires that a handling unit structure be defined. Without the handling units it is not possible to calculate a correct gross volume or weight. However, it is possible to calculate the net weight. Regardless of this, you can print a delivery note without a defined handling unit structure, any time during the shipment process until the shipment reaches the Closed status. You can print the delivery note using the Print Delivery Note command from the header of the shipment.
For customer orders, it should be noted that a DIRDEL message can be sent automatically to the ordering customer for parts that have been delivered directly to the end customer via shipment.