How to Include a Freight Forwarder in Your Lead Time

Overview

SoStocked gives you the ability to create many lead times, modeling all different types of shipping scenarios. For example, if you have a supplier manufacture inventory, then immediately warehouse it with a freight forwarder, bundling that inventory with another shipment and then sending it on to its final destination.

This video explains and shows some of the ways you can customize your ordering and lead times.

Getting Started

In your Vendors area, you have four vendor types: Supplier, Warehouse, Prep Center, and Freight Forwarder.Anytime you're sending inventory from a supplier to another location, it must be assigned as a warehouse unless that location is Amazon.

So let's say West Side storage is a freight forwarder. If you want to use them as a destination for your lead time, then they have to be marked as a warehouse. Our system is designed to only store inventory at warehouses.

Make sure to check the warehouse box. It can also be marked as a freight forwarder, although that's mostly for internal tracking. To store inventory, they have to be a warehouse.

Setting Up Lead Time

Once done, you can proceed with the lead time. Click the Lead Times button (shown below), and it will direct you to the lead time area.

Choose from the lead times listed. You can either Copy or Edit the existing lead time on the list.

You can customize the lead time name, and a good naming convention would be something similar shown below.

FF stands for Freight forwarder. In this specific example, WS stands for the freight forwarder name Westside Storage. The products that the supplier is creating will immediately go into the warehouse (Westside Storage).From there, they're going to do other things that are needed to be done on the product as a freight forwarder. Afterward, they will ship it to the Third Party Warehouse in the United States as their final destination before transferring to Amazon.

Creating PO using Forecast Menu

You can actually use this new lead time with the freight forwarder. Let's say you're going to place a purchase order of 500 units of the can openers below. You can start on the Forecast menu. Starting your Purchase order from the forecast page will auto-fill all your previously saved information to save you time.

Alternatively, you can create a purchase order from scratch by going to the top left corner and clicking the green + sign, then clicking PO (Purchase Order).

So the default lead time for supplier ABC is this lead time where it's going direct to Amazon, but you're going through a freight forwarder, and the products are going to be bundled a little differently.

Choose the FF lead time. Click Confirm.

Ordering from Multiple Suppliers on the Same PO

Additionally, you can create another purchase order of a different product and have it bundled by your freight forwarder with the current product. So we already have the first PO, as shown below.

And then you're going to place another PO from XYZ supplier. For this example, let's say you'd like to bundle can opener with shampoo (because why not? LOL!)

You need to make sure that you choose a lead time for each product so that both meet up at the freight forwarder.

Since they are different products, it's normal that they have different production lead times. You can easily customize their production lead times by changing the number of days accordingly (as shown below). Afterward, click confirm.

Then you can go to the next step.

Having two (or more) Work Orders

Now you're going to have two different work orders because, ideally, each warehouse needs to have its own work order.

(What is the purpose of a work order? Well, imagine if you woke up one day and you open your front door, and there was a pallet of dog toys on your front step. No note. No work order. No instructions. Just the pallet of dog toys. That would be kind of confusing, right? The whole purpose of the work order is to give the warehouse (or, in this case, the freight forwarder) instructions on what to with all these inventories.

The freight forwarder will expect all three of these different products (the two components of the can opener and the shampoo). Click Go to Next Steps.

Now, you are on the final work order, which is the instructions for the Denver Warehouse. They will receive all the inventory from your freight forwarder, and they are going to stock it into inventory.

Once done, click Save & Preview.

Reviewing POs and Work Orders

You've got your first Purchase Order #123 from your first supplier (ABC) for the can opener components.

You've got your second Purchase Order #124 from your second supplier (XYZ) for the shampoo.

You got your first work order, which is for the freight forwarder to bundle all that inventory and do whatever they're going to do with it.

And you've also got the final work order for the Denver Warehouse.

Sending Options

Once you click Submit Order, you have two options on how to send the order: by downloading the files and sending them manually to the recipients or by emailing them via SoStocked.