Track on time delivery in Microsoft Business Central
Add delivery tracking to Business Central
Your customers want to know they can rely on you.
Holding your team accountable to perform is a great first step.
Within Business Central there is a straight forward method doing just that. Here, we will explain the basic structure. Feel free to reach out if you have questions regarding the setup.
A late shipment is simple. When you ship the product after your customer expected it, then it is late.
Simple right? Let's see how that is done.
Within Business Central, there are two documents that are that are used:
On these documents the important fields are:
The first two exist on the Sales Order. Here your team will be able to input the date that the customer is requesting to receive the items or the date that you promised for the items to be received.
When your team enters one or both of these fields in the Sales Order it will be included on the shipment of that order once it is posted.
A simply workflow. Add your promises, then pay attention to the date you actually ship. Best place to review that? More on that below.
Let's create some reports and see how reliable we are.
For reporting, we recommend Power BI to all of our clients.
We've built the reports below and they are part of our On Time Delivery package (Scroll to the end to the review the package). To see how to DIY the reports, keep reading.
Within the report designer we will pull the data by clicking the Get Data button in the top Home ribbon. From there, search for Business Central.
Once you've selected and connected to your Business Central you will need to select the environment from which to grab the data.
From here the you need the table that has the Posted Sales Shipments. Within the Business Central data model, this is located in the workflowSalesDocuments.
This table contains a ton of information that may be useful for how you want to frame or measure your KPIs. The fields we will use for calculating the specific KPIs are:
The best way to get started is to create a relationship between your Shipment Date and a date table.
Once this is done the basic calculated column we can create is as follows:
On Time Delivery Days = DATEDIFF(workflowSalesDocuments[promisedDeliveryDate],workflowSalesDocuments[shipmentDate],DAY)
This formula calculates the date difference between our promised delivery date (you can swap this for requested delivery date if you choose) and the shipment date. This will give us a basic sense of the time between these two important dates and allows us to create KPIs as needed.
For creating the KPI's you can use a combination of the above fields to configure exactly what you're looking for. Here are some suggestions for ideas:
