Information Systems:Order Minimums

In order to help lower the high cost of delivery, we have daily order minimums for customers (not shareholders). As of November 2015, they are -

BC lower mainland     $ 500

Anywhere else in BC     750

Alberta                1000

Anywhere else          1500

Note: As of July 1, 2017 to minimum for Yukon is now 2500. Manual override for 3 customers.

This is calculated by the program WSUPDMIN2, which is called for all stores every night, and for an individual store during partner maintenance in InfoNet. Instead of following the above rule, the order minimum can be overridden. For example, Southwest Central fill is right in our building, so their order minimum has been overridden to a dollar. It is very expensive to ship to Fort Nelson, so the order minimum there is overriden from $750 to $1500.

You can see the effect of this in InfoNet / Carrier Interface / Freight to Sales Analysis

This was done in June 2015. See how freight, as a percentage of sales, has halved. While the monthly sales has stayed about the same.

When we receive a POS order, either by email or FTP, after the regular item checking is done and valid order lines are found, IOPMIN01 is called by IOPPOS00 to check if the customer is over their daily minimum or not. It calls WSORDAMT to accumulate the total of orders already accepted today, plus orders held in IOP with status 55 (under daily order minimum). It then adds the order currently being validated. If the total is under the minimum, the currently order is changed to status 55, and the email confirmation says 'Under order minimum. Please increase order'.

If the total is over the daily order minimum, the current order is posted to ASW, then IOPMIN03 is called to release any held orders for stores that have now gone over the daily minimum.

UW_CART in Web Orders also calls WSORDAMT to get the total of orders already received (accepted or not) today. So the regular cart will show any POS orders that have been held, and allow the user to click on one to see the order lines. The user cannot submit a Web Order until the total is over their daily order minimum. Once they do, any held POS orders will also be released.

When an order is manually entered into ASW, the user will get a message if the store is under their daily order minimum, but it is a warning only - not a hard stop. After the manual order is submitted, IOPMIN03 will be run to see if held orders can be released.

A potential problem is that the value of the held order can change as stock levels in the warehouse change. So a current order may be released because its total puts the store over the minimum, but when the held order is re-validated we may have gone out of stock of some item(s), so the order value will decrease.

This has rarely happened, and the store normally contacts us when it has. For example, the above store in Fort Nelson could submit an order for $1490; which would be held. They could then do an order for $12, which would be released because 1490 plus 12 is over 1500. Then when the first order is re-validated, we may have run out of stock of a $50 item, decreasing the value of the held order to $1440. That, plus the accepted order of $12 is under 1500, so it would still be held.

Every night IOPMIN04 is run to search for any held orders that are four or more days old, and then calls IOPMIN05 to cancel them.