Internal Newsletter Welcome

• How many sales orders do I have open right now? 
• How many of those are late?
• How many could be released but are held up for some reason (credit hold)?

Every person in Customer Service asks these questions. In the past, there have been a number of ways to answer them, but all of these methods required manual intervention.

A new tool is now available to all Connector CSRs to help in the battle of sales order follow-through. Beginning Monday July 18, 2011, all CSRs will get an automated email with a summary of their open sales orders.  This report is aimed at helping you expedite open orders.  It also served to give a CSR that “big picture” view of their open orders.

When you get it, you will probably have some questions.

• How is this information sorted?

  • The rows will be sorted by earliest open line promised date.  TrulinX defaults the promise date to the same value as the required date when entering lines.

• What is the difference between Required Date and Promised Date?

  • Required Date is generally the date we expect the customer to receive the material.  Sometimes the customer gives us this date.  Often times, we estimate it and even give it to the customer.  “It should be here by Thursday.”

  • Promised Date is the date we reasonably expect the material to get to the customer.  In the majority of cases, this will remain the same as the Required Date.  This can be changed in a SO Line to reflect a change in expected delivery.  (We told the customer it would be here in 3 days, now it’s 3 weeks)

• What’s up with all of the colors?

  • RED reflects sales orders with the earliest line Promised Date  of 1 month or older.  This generally means that we are late on delivering this order and we have not expedited it.  We should look into why it is late, change the promised date on the SO Line to reflect the new date the customer can expect to receive his material, and notify the customer.

  • YELLOW reflects sales orders with the earliest Promised Date from 0 to 30 days late.  Expediting practices are the same as for RED lines; we just got to them a little earlier. 

  • WHITE lines are “on deck.”  These lines have Promised Dates that are in the upcoming 14 days.  They are not yet late, but are in danger of becoming late if they do not ship by the promise date.

  • GREEN lines are more than 14 days into the future, thus are not required to ship soon.  Be mindful that this is simply informational.  If an order is set to ASAP, the lines will release as soon as all required constraints are met, regardless of dates.

• Ok… So, Why the colors??

  • The goal of the colors is to help highlight late orders that need to be expedited.  Highlighting keys off of the promised date, so once and order line has been expedited and the promised dated changed, its color will reflect the new promised date. 

• How often should I be looking at this?

  • Most CSRs will receive the report via email on Monday mornings.  The goal is not to burden you with more workload, but to give you another tool to help you get through a day.  It is entirely up to you to decide when and how to use that tool.  As always, changes can be made and suggestions are welcome. 

- Eric