The Business Notification solution is used to generate and send notifications to inform your vendors or colleagues from other departments about certain events. For example, you may send a notification when you have placed an order and received some of the purchased items, but you are waiting for delivery of the rest of the order. Sending a notification will alert your supplier that some of the goods have not yet been delivered. By enabling this feature in the Notification Setup window, you allow the program to send out six predefined notifications.
Types of Notifications
There are two approaches to generating notifications: time-based and field change-based.
The Business Notification solution offers five time-based notifications that alert the recipient about:
- Upcoming deliveries
- Items that were not received after the promised receipt date
- Purchase order confirmations that were not received
- Delayed production orders
- Current inventory status
To see the list of the available time-based notifications, open the Notifications window.
The sixth, field change-based, notification is used for tracking changes in the production BOM status. If you have selected the Send Notifications check box in the Notification Setup window, this notification is sent every time the status in the corresponding field changes.
Logging Period
You can define how long you want to store sent notification entries. You can specify this period in the Notification Setup window and use it as a default for all time-based notifications, or you can assign a logging period to each separate batch.
Batches
Batches are used for managing a specific set of notifications. You can choose to send out up to five predefined time-based notifications for your batch. Field change-based notifications will be sent out automatically.
Sending Notifications
In order to send notification lines, you must first collect them. Among the lines you collect, there may be some notification entries that were sent earlier. Should the lines have been sent earlier, there will be a check mark in the Sent field for these lines and the most recent time the notification was sent will be posted in the Notification Lines window.
You can also delete notification lines or postpone sending notifications until a later time. For more information about this, refer to Sending Notifications.