The moment a truck leaves your gates, at its destination they already know what’s loaded onto it and when the goods will arrive. A luxury? For automotive, it’s simply standard, because the supplier sends the customer an Advanced Shipping Notice (ASN) at the moment of shipment. Alongside the call-off, it’s one of the two key messages in the whole supply chain. It offers information on the delivery in progress – what goods it contains, in what amounts and packaging, and when they’ll arrive. All this leads to an optimised supplier-customer chain, more precise production planning and optimised stocks.
An ASN’s specific contents can vary based on which standard it follows, even despite the fact that customers are using the same EDI message standard. You’ll also sometimes find it under different names: Manifest, DESADV or EDI 856. But an ASN by any other name tells just the same basic things about an ongoing shipment:
- information on the order/call-off,
- the delivery date and time,
- the delivery location,
- the quantity, codes and weights for the pallets or other packaging,
- information on the type of goods,
- information on the supplier.
The higher you are in the supply chain, the more often you’ll find automakers and TIER1 suppliers even setting the specific time and place for unloading, i.e. the gate to drive in through. There we’re talking of Just-in-Time (JIT) deliveries. The core of JIT is simple: automakers don’t have room for stocks of individual parts, and thus they require that parts be delivered just in time. Therefore they harmonise their entire production and supply chain so that individual parts will arrive when they need to be mounted, or in the shortest needed time before assembly. When parts are delivered straight to the assembly line, meanwhile, these are Just-in-Sequence deliveries. We’ll be describing them in the future.
ASNs as the foundation for receipt and billing
An ASN is more than just ordinary information about shipped goods. It’s also used for physically checking a delivery. During receipt at the customer, the individual handling units are identified – most often using barcodes – and they are re-checked based on their ASNs. This amounts to an automatic check that all the goods in the notification have actually been sent. The whole process primarily saves time and reduces errors.
Last but not least, the ASN is one of the foundations for billing – either traditionally or via a “self-billing system”. You can only bill an automaker for actually delivered goods that match confirmed ASNs. This is also one of the areas where you can be penalised – for failing to send an ASN, for sending it late, for sending different goods than those listed in the ASN or for mis-formatted ASNs that the automaker cannot read. Want to avoid errors like these and penalty fees? Get an EDI system that will let you be flexible in your customer counts and message standards, and also adapt your transmissions to your customers’ specific demands on data format and structure. We have precisely such a system for you: aimtecglobal.com/en/edi.