Jared Ward: 0:00Welcome to the Product Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, jared, with our head of product, billy, happy to be here. We missed last month, but we are more dedicated than ever to post every month, so this is gonna be sort of like a July August mega post. It's the July August update, all right, so let's go ahead and get started, All right.‍

‍Billy Bush: 0:18

well, let's start talking custom fields for me.

Jared Ward: 0:21

Luminous has had custom fields for quite some time. Now we have an actual spot in the menu where you can go and you can configure all of these. So if you go here, there are custom fields that can be applied to multiple different objects in the system. It wasn't that way before. So I can create a custom field. You can do a string number, a date, a dropdown, really anything you want, and then you can assign it to the objects. So some of the new ones that you probably haven't seen are purchase order, so supplier purchase order, assembly order, disassembly order and a sales order item. So those are the new custom fields. It honestly it makes us super flexible for a bunch of different use cases. But, yeah, new custom fields.

Billy Bush: 0:59

All right. Next, we have the our fulfillment order grid, which is really your fulfillment order command center. For us, fulfillment orders are really. I mean, you get a sales order from some sort of sales channel and how you plan to fulfill that order may vary, of course, and especially for some types of orders like b2b orders you know wholesale things like this that can vary quite a bit more. So we create a fulfillment order and allow you to create as many fulfillment orders as you need to to split things up, adjust how you're going to actually fulfill. Really big order might have a whole bunch of them. Simple order might only have one.

Billy Bush: 1:34

So our new view here with our fulfillment orders grid, allows you to see the status on the fulfillment orders themselves, even if they might be attached to. You know one sales order that's got 30 fulfillments, some big you know monster wholesale order. Or maybe you do pre sales and you've you've pre sold a bunch and it helps you plan your fulfillment. So you can actually see when you need to actually fulfill on those pre sale items what's upcoming, what's already shipped, what's you know planning to be shipped, and these can be broken up across your sales order. So that's the idea here that gives you a lot more flexibility than just seeing a sales order that just says partially fulfilled. We don't know what that means. Well, it turns out there's 35 fulfillment orders, different statuses on them, different things going on and allowing you a lot of flexibility.

Jared Ward: 2:21

This was. This was a massive, foundational update. Luminous actually didn't even have fulfillment orders and shipments before, so Luminous has a bunch of hybrid brands. Sales order will come in from all over different channels Shopify, wholesale, third-party platforms. Sales orders will come into Luminous. Luminous will split those off into fulfillment orders and then they can get routed somewhere.

Jared Ward: 2:44

So, for example, we can route orders to a 3PL that is on stored, or it could be routed based on inventory availability to another 3PL that's on Ship Hero. Or, if you want to route it to your little office or a little warehouse where you do some fulfillment on Ship Station. All of those are available and it can be done automatically. But this grid more is like it's kind of like a command center where you could possibly do it manually. Think about, like a project management, this sidebar right here where you can have, you know, set automations, where it'll, you know, flag something as an error if something's happening with a payment processor or you know, as we get into waves and just a little bit like happening with a payment processor or you know, as we get into waves and just a little bit like, oh, this is so, it could go from awaiting shipment and then it goes into plan, which is like a queue of what's going to be automatically pushed, so it just opens up a lot of possibilities and this is like the command center for your fulfillment wherever.

Billy Bush: 3:41

And with that and all of that flexibility, as Jared hinted at, we have wave management, which a wave is essentially, as it sounds like, the waves of what we're pushing these orders in, like a cycle or a wave. You know, throughout the day, and what this really means is your 3PL, your fulfillment center, whatever it might be, may have a certain level of capacity. Let's start there. And they can do. They know they can effectively fulfill a thousand orders a day. Well, if you're getting 1500 orders a day, you know pushing all 1500 to them is just going to backlog them and cause problems. And so you know, with our wave settings you can actually set a cap, line things out, cue them up to be pushed on the next day when it makes sense, push them in cycles.

Billy Bush: 4:25

So we're not going to push them. You know, real time. Maybe we do it every so many hours we're going to push out what's available so that they get it in those waves up to capacity limits and and the beauty of that is it also allows you to do some failover. So once we've hit a daily cap at our main fulfillment center, maybe we have a backup fulfillment center and we can actually then create fulfillment orders for the backup center and you can. There's a lot of different, just amazing capabilities to control and manage the flow of your fulfillments and then cascade those things across. Yeah, multiple warehouses split orders up in different combinations and all sorts of things.

Jared Ward: 5:04

It's especially big for our brands that are like 100 million plus, where they have this problem at.

Billy Bush: 5:09

Vulcan.

Jared Ward: 5:10

They can only route based on the daily capacity of their 3PL and they want backups and all this Another part. That is really cool. So if you're a brand that does pre-orders, for example, and you want to group the pushing to the 3PLs based on the estimated ship date, for example, it's really cool. So we have progressive pre-order processing. It can push based on when a ship date. Basically it could go into planned, it can go into the queue based on when the estimated ship date is coming due.

Billy Bush: 5:42

Yeah, and that's the big piece here is you can set that estimated ship date from your sales channel. So on that sales channel we've said we're probably gonna it's a pre-order, we're gonna ship these out at the end of October and that goes into that queue to group those together so that they're ready to go and you're not gonna push them immediately and they sit on some you know, 3pl Um, and so yeah, it's killer when it comes to to doing things like big pre-orders, pre-sales, anything like that, and it won't. The other benefit is it won't clog up your um, pending inventory queues and things like this. So it's not going to like lock up inventory that might be available now, you know, as a, as it's like a pending sale, it's going to actually withhold that until you know it's time to actually become a fulfillable order. So a lot of control there to get a lot more creative and particularly hinting when your volume starts to increase. So bigger brands with high volume.

Jared Ward: 6:44

And on that, we've also expanded our smart fulfillment settings. We went over this on one of the last episodes, which is basically just auto-splitting, auto-consolidating orders a bunch of random things. Um, with the, this concept of waves, um, it introduced this concept of okay, well, if we're splitting off fulfillment order, we need a default setting for okay, if that gets split off and in queue to get routed to a 3pl, should it be? Should it go into pending, which will take down available, or should it have a separate status, which is like planned, which does it go into pending, which will take down available, or should it have a separate status, which is like planned, which does not go to pending and therefore affect available? So, some cool settings there. These will eventually fall at the channel level, but, yeah, a bunch of new updates on the order running Really cool stuff.

Jared Ward: 7:28

Next, this is one that we've been waiting for for quite some time Again, luminous services, a lot of multi-warehouse brands. They could have a 3pl or multiple 3pls on different systems. So this one gives you the routing capabilities at the top of supply chain. When you draft po's, split off shipments, what you're already doing as an operator and typically you have to log into your 3pl systems, wms you have to input an ASN or like a future receipt and then you reconcile in like a Google Sheet.

Billy Bush: 7:59

Now.

Jared Ward: 7:59

Luminous can be the control center for the routing of the shipment. So this is really cool. If you go to one of our warehouse groups that is externally managed, in other words, it's managed on a WMS. Setting this up is super easy so you can choose auto push po shipments. Now you can choose the status or statuses that will trigger this to get pushed. So, for example, if you have like custom shipment statuses where release from the factory and maybe another status could be like gets to the port of china or maybe the port of port of origin or port of destiny however you want it you can have, whenever you change the shipment to a specific status, then it will automatically push an ASN to the 3PL's WMS, which then will follow the normal reconciliation flow once it's finished and the beauty there is, it will auto reconcile because you pushed it to your 3PL.

Billy Bush: 8:53

It will auto reconcile with that pushed it to your 3PL. It will auto reconcile with that shipment. So when the 3PL actually starts receiving the goods and marking them in their WMS as received, we're receiving that notice and marking the shipment as received automatically.

Jared Ward: 9:06

Oh yeah.

Billy Bush: 9:07

So it really checks that off makes it a lot easier. I mean, you create that shipment, you push it to the 3PL, so now you don't have to create it there, and then on top of that, as they receive it, it's automatically being done on your end and you don't have to go follow back up on it and you can see the sync status right here so you can see if something failed.

Jared Ward: 9:26

Uh, there's also different ways to troubleshoot it. I can't remember how, but they're okay they're really All right.

Billy Bush: 9:33

Next, we have a small update for updating inventory to your sales channel.

Billy Bush: 9:37

So obviously you know your Shopify store or whatever third party needs to know how much you have in stock to be able to sell.

Billy Bush: 9:45

Typically, we have pushed whatever we have showing as available which could be across warehouses, locations, all sorts of things, rolled it all up and said this is how much you've got houses, locations, all sorts of things, rolled it all up and said this is how much you've got. Now we have a new feature that allows you to dictate which of your locations is going to be used as the inventory location for that update. So, for instance, your Shopify store, you may only want to show the available inventory at your local warehouse and not at your other warehouses or other. You know fulfillment solutions so you can set it to only update with the inventory from your local warehouse or from a particular 3PL so that it keeps you don't oversell into wanting it to spill over into other locations and for various reasons you may want to do that. But you have more granular control as to the numbers that are actually pushed up to your sales channels as available inventory. And, yeah, giving that control there.

Jared Ward: 10:37

And this was so. This is also expansion onto our channel product mapping page. It reminded me of another feature that's actually very important. So you now have the ability to set percentage allocations at a SKU and a channel level.

Jared Ward: 10:50

So if you look at the buffer types, uh, you can do a fixed buffer, which just means like, say, you have five available but you want a buffer of one, then we will push four. So the buffer is just to make sure, like it's for safety. So so there's a um. There's a little workaround that you can do with buffers to get percentage allocations of different skews across different channels. So, for example, if I want to you know I'm buying a thousand units and they're getting received at this 3PL, but I want to be able to take that whatever's available at the 3PL and do a percentage breakdown or a percentage allocation like 30% to Shopify and 30% to Amazon, fbm and 30% wherever else. You can do that now. Now it's done at a SKU level, so SKw and channel level. But how you do it is you go to the buffer type, you you choose percent and then you set a percent buffer at a skew level and at the channel level. So super cool. If you want to have your three pls inventory numbers but control the allocation at a channel level. That you can't do in your WMS. You can now do that in Luminous. Okay, so this features more of our wholesale channels.

Jared Ward: 12:00

So what's really common is when Luminous takes in wholesale sales orders, splits off fulfillment orders, routes them to, say, a 3PL or to a ship station. What happens is you'll split off multiple different shipments most likely to fulfill that that PO, from from the retailer, from your wholesaler. A lot of times it doesn't go out in one shipment and even if it does, that's fine. This use case can still be handled. So the creation of the invoice we found is typically triggered by what actually ships out. If you go to the channels I'm at a random EDI channel and staging.

Jared Ward: 12:36

So let's say we choose, create invoice automatically, you can choose the type of invoice that's generated automatically and then the invoice creation timing. This is you can do it when a sales order is received, you can do it when a shipment is created. This is the main use case that we were servicing, where I have a big sales order fulfillment order routes to a 3PL. They split off into four shipments across like three weeks and then you just want to auto-invoice the retailer or whoever is going to owe you money whenever that ships out. So this is possible now and you can also automatically sync the A10 if it's configured and you can also, by the way, you can manually trigger these things. You just go to a sales order so you can see the items, fulfillment orders, refund orders and the invoices, and you can invoice from a shipment or multiple shipments.

Billy Bush: 13:30

Yeah, expanding the triggers available there. They'll probably expand a little bit further, but that's even giving you lots of flexibility. The fulfillment order-based ones are nice for those as well where if you're going to ship out 30 boxes but you don't want 30 invoices 15 in one day, so then you can do it by fulfillment order, so you still get only one for half of the full sales order. It gives you lots of flexibility for sure. So that's definitely nice in that case.

Jared Ward: 13:55

Okay. So this is a really cool update on our build materials. What we kept seeing people do was they would add a SKU as a cost that would just automatically add to the build materials. And we said, heck like, why don't we just go ahead and add this capability of an extra cost to a bomb that will just automatically appear whenever you're doing a work order or an assembly order? So this is really cool. So, for example, if you just want to bake in labor or like there's always some assumed freight or something that happens whenever you're doing a work order of a specific unit, it's just baked in every single time.

Billy Bush: 14:31

And even for materials that maybe you don't track. Inventory that's a big one. It's true that you have, it is a material and it has a fixed cost. It's pretty clear. It's a dollar per label. But you don't actually have to. You know the nature of the relationship or, however you get them, you don't need to track how many labels you have left. So instead of having to make it an inventoried item, you have to make sure stock shows up, and most clients would just throw in a million units because it's obviously not tracked. That's what they'd do before. Now they can just actually add it as an extra cost, say it's a label fee, and it pipes right in as a non-inventory item into your assembly order.

Jared Ward: 15:05

When you have a co-man that's manufacturing stuff and let's say you're buying the packaging and the labels, maybe, but you don't want to keep track of the inventory because it's like whatever, it's just a cost.

Billy Bush: 15:17

Yeah, you're never short on it. It's always available to you.

Jared Ward: 15:20

Or the co-man is purchasing and they charge you a fee.

Billy Bush: 15:24

Okay, this last one, related to the assembly orders and bill of materials, is bulk creation of assembly orders, so being able to create an assembly order for not just one SKU at a time, but you now can actually add in a bunch of line items for additional SKUs, to create a whole bunch of assembly orders all at once.

Billy Bush: 15:43

There are still some options that you need to select. So we now have a essentially a bulk creation form that makes it a little easier to be able to make those selections, quickly add in a bunch of related SKUs or whatever you're trying to do, and, uh and yeah, whip up you know as many assembly orders as you need, um for various SKUs all at once. Even if lots are required, you need to select lots on certain ingredients and um components in those assemblies, um, you can still do that, although you may, depending on um. You know what selections are there. It may create them as drafts that you just have to go in and tell you know which lot is actually going to be consumed for the individual ones. But the bulk of the work is done right. So that's. It's really nice if you're ever having to do, you know, bulk assembly.

Jared Ward: 16:25

Yeah, this one has been requested for a long time, so we're really excited to roll this one out for a lot of our existing customers and future customers. But that's basically it. So a lot of really cool updates this week or this. A lot of several months, yeah, these past several months. We will see you guys at the end of september.

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