Recently we experienced a situation where an order was confirmed, subsequently prepped for courier dispatch & assigned as usual, however - customer made a last-minute addition to the order & this was amended by sales. The ‘Assigned’ tag was missed, the order returned to draft, changed & updated, and not properly communicated to dispatch. As far as dispatch were concerned the order was ready for courier collection in its original form - luckily the change was picked up before the courier collected, however, If the deliveries screen hadn’t been revisited again until orders were marked as ‘Out for Delivery’, this would have gone out incorrectly.
There is an internal process we need to revisit here, but it made us think if there was something Breww could assist us with.
Could it be helpful if once an order has been assigned or part-assigned/in-progress for picking, there was a pop-up warning/prompt when the order is returned to draft? Just something like - this order is prepared for dispatch, are you sure you want to amend this?
Or even, don’t allow sales to return orders to draft if assigned. Then sales would have to communicate with dispatch. An “are you sure” message will just get clicked through.
I guess this would have to be configurable, it’s policy I suppose.
Thanks Steve and Jon. You’re not really missing a process to be honest, it’s certainly a step where mistakes could be made currently.
I like the idea of a tick box to prevent an order from being returned to draft if there’s anything assigned to its delivery. At which point, as Jon says, they should have to communicate with another team. At this point, items would either need to be unassigned to return the order to draft, or the setting to enable this could be briefly toggled.
If anyone else would find this useful, please do give this a vote and we’ll see what we can do!
I agree a message could be clicked through, but in my mind an active click is not simply misreading a tag - but agreed with you both the issue here boils down to a break down in communication.
Whilst this has only happened once, it is unlikely (especially now), but feasibly could happen again for us as certain couriers only pickup once a week. If an order is confirmed it makes sense to prepare it in advance if there is time, as 99% of the time they don’t change.
I like the idea of the tickbox as this would give flexibility to those that do & don’t want the feature. Are you proposing something global in settings, or something on each delivery? Or approaching this from another angle could this be handled with permissions, e.g.: can revert assigned & confirmed orders back to draft type thing?
Then you might use the system to enforce the requirement for communication. If you have such a requirement, if you want to enforce it. It’s happened here a few times (pre Breww as it happens) because (I suspect) folks see their work as screen based magic, forgetting that the actual wrangling of physical stock is more constrained.
I had been thinking of a global setting (not per-order/delivery), but I think the “can revert assigned & confirmed orders back to draft” permission could be even better as you then have total flexibility.
This could be coupled with a warning, so if you have the permission, you get the warning and can do the action. If you don’t have permission, you get the warning and get told to find someone else with this permission.