Bill of Lading Overview

Introduction

When a shipment leaves the facility, a bill of lading is produced and must be signed by the driver. The driver takes one or more copies, and you keep one or more for internal use. The bill of lading documents a transfer of property from your care to the care of the transportation provider. There is very specific verbiage that must appear on the document to protect your organization if a legal question arises regarding the products on this shipment. The U.S. Department of Transportation also establishes specific rules regarding information that must be present governing structure and layout as well as specific requirements for identifying various categories of restricted freight. In addition to the warehouse receipt, it is one of the more critical documents in your operation.

WDLS was designed to generate bills of lading that allow you to incorporate various account specific and operational needs with a bill that provides clear documentation of the shipment contents, summarizes the freight to facilitate freight company requirements and freight bills, and follows the guidelines for government compliance. We also realize that this is a key document for your organization and there may be a need to customize the final format of the bill to carry forward your brand.

To accomplish this, WDLS breaks the production of the bill of lading into two parts. The first part assembles all the information for the body of the bill and structures it into a sequence and format consistent with regulations. This part of the logic remains standard for all accounts. The second part takes information associated with the order header combined with this pre-constituted body and produces the final document format. This second part is often customized to adjust column spacing and page position to your specific forms.

This chapter describes the setup of WDLS to produce bills of lading matching your requirements and various maintenance options used to control the formatting of the body of the document. It also describes the process of producing bills of lading.

Using Stored Text to Format the Body of The Bill

Using setup options, text can be stored at a variety of levels to be incorporated in the bill of lading when it is produced. The capability allows you to establish specific verbiage for all bills, for a specific account, for specific type of items, for specific items, for a given consignee, for certain classes of freight, etc. Knowledge of this setup allows you to get specific bills of lading with all your required information using a minimal amount of keying. It also allows you to build in prompts to capture specific information from the warehouse such as the number of pallets used for the shipment.

Identifying The Bill of Lading Style

WDLS has several standard bills of lading that can be selected for each account. These accommodate a variety of operational requirements such as producing a single document for picking and functioning as the bill of lading, production of plain paper bills of lading, multi-part forms, and of course any custom bill you have for your facility. A default is set during initial installation that functions for all your accounts. A specific bill can be set for each account that has a requirement other than the default bill.

Producing Bills of Lading

A bill of lading can be produced for any WDLS order. Bills can be re-printed if necessary or re-produced long after shipment. Typically, bills are produced either up front when the order is released to the warehouse or after picking is complete and any variations found in picking are recorded on the order. The latter is preferable since it results in a "clean" bill of lading. Bills are generally printed based upon a manual request to produce the bill.

Master-Bill and Consolidated Shipments

When multiple orders are consolidated onto a truck, a Master Bill of Lading is produced for the shipment. This is either a separate document that acts as a cover sheet for the individual bills of lading, or it can be a consolidated bill of lading that contains the items for all the shipments in the consolidated body of the bill. The coversheet is used more often, with the latter only used per account requirements when orders are communicated as consolidated shipments by the account.