NetSuite Pick, Pack, and Ship

NetSuite for Administrators

How do you fulfill orders in your warehouse? A warehouse of any size has multiple moving pieces as inventory comes in and goes out. Having a well-defined order fulfillment process is essential for maintaining clear communication through the entire warehouse, no matter how many individuals need to touch a single order to get it out the door. The NetSuite Pick, Pack, and Ship feature gives you that essential communication in your order fulfillment process. Let’s take a look.

NetSuite Pick, Pack, and Ship Overview

What it is

The Pick, Pack, and Ship feature allows you to track the individual statuses of your order fulfillments. With this feature, you can identify an order as being picked, packed, or shipped by filling out the corresponding NetSuite transaction. If you use this feature without the Advanced Shipping feature, then once an item has gone through the pick, pack, ship process NetSuite will generate the invoice and mark the order as Fully Billed. With Advanced Shipping, on the other hand, you will be able to bill the order separately from the fulfillment process.

How to set it up

You can enable the Pick, Pack, and Ship feature on the Shipping & Receiving section of the Transactions tab in Enable Features. You can also enable Advanced Shipping in this section if it is not turned on.
NetSuite features shipping and receiving

You’ll want to set a couple preferences before you begin using Pick, Pack, and Ship. Navigate to Setup > Accounting > Setup Tasks > Shipping to set these preferences.

NetSuite set up shipping preferences
The preference Default Item Fulfillment Stage allows you to choose the default status of an order (whether picked, packed, or shipped) when you fill out an order fulfillment record. Of course, you can always select a different status when you are on an order fulfillment record. The other preference you may want to set is the Shipping Label Creation Stage preference. If you have the Shipping Label Integration feature turned on, this preferences lets you decide at which status NetSuite will generate tracking numbers and the shipping label for an order.

NetSuite Pick, Pack, and Ship Process

Let’s walk through the pick, pack, ship process. The entire process begins when your warehouse receives a sales order. The sales order shows up in a list on your Fulfill Orders page. Where do you go from there?

Picking an Order in NetSuite

First, navigate to the Fulfill Orders page (Shipping > Shipping > Fulfill Orders).
Fulfill orders page
On this page, notice the field Set Shipment Status To has been set to Picked by default. Any orders you fulfill from this page will be marked as picked. If you changed this field to Packed or Shipped, then fulfilling orders from this page would cause those orders to receive the corresponding status.

But for this article, we’ll assume you want to mark your orders as Picked first. A warehouse employee would either use this page or the individual sales order to start the fulfillment process. From the Fulfill Orders page, select the Fulfill checkbox next to the appropriate order and then hit the Submit button.

This will pull up the Item Fulfillment – To Be Generated page. If you’re going to partially fulfill the order, you can adjust the quantities you’re fulfilling using the Items tab on this page. Otherwise, save the record.

To be generated item fulfillment

At this point, NetSuite generates an Item Fulfillment record that has the status of Picked and a Mark Packed button which allows you to move the order to the next step in the fulfillment process.

item fulfillment picked status

If you go to the individual order, however, it will not display the Picked status. From the sales order point of view, the order is just in the fulfillment stage, so the order will have the status of Pending Fulfillment.

NetSuite sales order pending fulfillment

Packing an Order in NetSuite

The next step in the process is to box up the order and mark it as packed in NetSuite. You can either do that from individual Item Fulfillment records, or you can do it in bulk from the Mark Orders Packed page. To use the Mark Orders Packed page, navigate to Shipping > Shipping > Mark Orders Packed. On this page, you can filter by customer and order type. You can also look up a specific order number.
mark orders packed in netsuite

Then, select the checkbox in the Pack column next to the order that you wish to mark as packed and hit the Submit button. You will be taken to a Process Status page while NetSuite processes the job.

netsuite pack orders process status

When the process is complete, the Item Fulfillment record for any orders you processed will show a status of Packed and display the Mark Shipped button.

NetSuite item fulfillment packed

Shipping an Order in NetSuite

The final step in the process is to ship the order out. To do that either hit the Mark Shipped button on an individual Item Fulfillment record or navigate to the Mark Orders Shipped page (Shipping > Shipping > Mark Orders Shipped). On this page, select any orders that you are shipping and hit the Submit button.
NetSuite mark orders shipped

After the job processes, the Item Fulfillment record will display the status of Shipped.

NetSuite item fulfillment shipped status
If you use Advanced Shipping, then at this point the order’s status changes from Pending Fulfillment to Pending Billing, and your accounting team can take over the process. If you do not use Advanced Shipping, then NetSuite will generate an invoice for the order and the order status will be Fully Billed.

Customizing Pick, Pack, and Ship

Maybe you’re interested in NetSuite’s Pick, Pack, and Ship feature, but you feel like it’s a lot more complicated than you need it to be. Or maybe you already use this feature, and you feel like there might be ways to accomplish the same results without going through so many clicks. One of our clients was in a similar position. They needed to use the Pick, Pack, and Ship feature, but they wanted to eliminate as many clicks as possible. With the customizations we created for them, they saw a 35% increase in efficiency and virtually all errors eliminated from the process.
If you’re interested in how SuiteRep can increase your efficiency and make sure you get the best value from your pick, pack, ship process, contact us to get the conversation started.

Conclusion

The NetSuite Pick, Pack, and Ship feature fuels accuracy and communication throughout the entire order fulfillment process. If this is a feature you would like to begin using in your account or if you have any other NetSuite needs, SuiteRep would love to come on board and help. Contact us to get the conversation started.