OFBiz Tutorial – Order Entry and Ship Groups

A robust enterprise eCommerce system needs to handle manual order entries that are sometimes complex. In this OFBiz Tutorial we will go over how this works in OFBiz.

Example:

An order clerk has to place a sales order on behalf of a customer (order received by fax, by mail, by phone etc..); the order contains several items and the customer asks that the order is shipped with two (or more) shipments with different delivery dates and/or to different postal addresses and/or with different shipment methods or shipping instructions; the customer clearly specify the items to be assigned to each shipment.

How can you do this in OFBiz?

The order clerk can easily place an order like this by defining multiple ship groups: ship groups represent a way to group into different sets the items of an order and each ship group has its own shipping options, delivery dates, shipment address. Ship groups are created during order checkout.

For example, let’s suppose that the order clerk has to place an order for 10 units of the product with id WG-1111 and 5 units of the product with id GZ-1000.

The customer needs immediately 5 units of WG-1111 and prefers to pay for the quickest shipment method available, while all the 5 units of GZ-1000 and the remaining 5 units of WG-1111 (together with some promotional items) can wait and so they will be shipped using a cheaper and slower shipping method later.

Let’s do this step by step.

The first part is easy because it is exactly like placing a standard order:

go to the order entry screen and enter the customer id

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add to the cart 10 units of WG-1111 and 5 units of GZ-1000 (don’t worry about the ship groups now, you will do this at checkout); if you are running the standard OFBiz demo you will also get some promotional items

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now we are ready for the checkout and we click on the “Finalize Order” button;

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the first checkout screen let us select the shipment address and this is where we add the second ship group that we need by clicking on the “New Ship Group” button:

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the page will reload with two ship group sections; set the shipment address for each of them and click on the “Continue” button

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in the next screen you will have the ability to move the items from one ship group to the other; initially all the items will be in the first ship group and the second one will be empty

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using the drop down boxes and the quantity field near each item you can move the items to the second ship group

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now click on the “Continue” button, the next screen will let you set the shipment method and options for each ship group; just make sure you select the proper method for each group;

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The next steps are exactly the same as a standard order, so complete the checkout and confirm the order.

The exercise is now complete!

If you visit the order detail screen you will notice that there are now two boxes for the shipment information (one for each group):

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You can now fulfill the order as usual and the only difference is that you will create two different shipments (one for each ship group): when the shipment is created from the ship group, OFBiz will create a shipment containing the items assigned to that ship group only.

– Jacopo


DATE: Apr 17, 2010
AUTHOR: Jacopo Cappellato
OFBiz Tutorials, Enterprise eCommerce, Warehouse and Inventory Management, OFBiz Development, OFBiz Tutorial, OFBiz Multiple Shipments, multiple ship groups, OFBiz Manual Order Entry, OFBiz, Jacopo Cappellato