This document describes the best practices for your DemandLine schedule transactions.
There are several references in this document to the configuration of your DemandLine schedules in the Partner Relationships view of DemandLine. This is Administrator functionality. To access the Partner Relationships view, follow these steps:
- Open the DemandLine menu
- Go to ‘Administration’
- Select ‘Partner Relationships’
Running the Schedule Transaction
How Often to Run it
We recommend that you pull a new schedule from each customer daily for these reasons:
- Capture all changes day-to-day
- Always have the most up-to-date schedules
- Ensure that your shipping department sees up-to-date shippable quantities in your ERP
When to Run it
In most situations, it is best to set up DemandLine so that schedules are retrieved overnight or in the early morning hours. When your schedule is retrieved from the customer system, it is imported into your ERP. If there are users or processes accessing records during this import, the process can be less efficient.
For this same reason, we recommend that you stagger the times schedule transactions are run if you are retrieving schedules from multiple customers. Review the Event/Transaction History to determine the average length of time each customer schedule takes to complete to be sure you are creating a large enough gap of time between transactions.
Importing the Schedule
Your DemandLine Schedule Interpreter will import each new schedule into your ERP. In order for this to occur, you must have an Interpreter selected in the Partner Relationships view for the customer.
Creating Schedule Comparisons
DemandLine performs several different analytics on your schedule data. One important analytic compares each new schedule the last schedule from that customer. This shows you has changed from one schedule to the next. In order to create schedule comparisons, make sure the option to ‘Automatically create comparison with last schedule’ is selected.