Why are my planned shipments not respecting the shipping groups?

If you have defined shipping groups with ratio between package types (e.g. Active 2 : Placebo 2), in some cases, the system will not respect this shipping group in the quantity shipped of the Shipments recommendations table of the Depot shipments planning. This can happen specifically if the stock at central depot is unbalanced.

Let’s take an example of a shipping group with a 1:1 ratio of active:placebo. This means that the same number of active and placebo have to be shipped in the same quantity.

For example, if the stock at central depot is:

Package type	Lot number	Expiry date	Number of kits
Active	Lot 1	1-Oct-20	10
Placebo	Lot 1	1-Oct-20	5

And you have the following future releases :

Package type	Lot number	Expiry date
Active	Lot 2	31-Dec-21
Placebo	Lot 2	31-Dec-21

Shipments recommendations could look like this :

Code	Package type	Suggested lot number	Expiry date	Quantity requested	Quantity shipped

Code	Package type	Suggested lot number	Expiry date	Quantity requested	Quantity shipped
Shipment 1	Active	Lot 1	1-Oct-20	20	10
Shipment 1	Active	Lot 2	31-Dec-21	20	30
Shipment 1	Placebo	Lot 1	1-Oct-20	20	5
Shipment 1	Placebo	Lot 2	31-Dec-21	20	35

We can see that the shipping groups are actually respected for the quantity requested but not for the quantity shipped. The expected result would be to send 5 kits of active and 5 of placebo (as it is the smaller available quantity that defines the number of kits to send in the shipping group) but instead the system is sending 10 kits of active and 5 of placebo.

This is due to the fact that the system will always try to send as much as possible from the older expiry to avoid waste.

Therefore, after converting the recommendations into planned shipments, the user should pay attention to balance the quantities to enforce the shipping groups constraint. In this case the planned shipments respecting the shipping group should be:

Code	Package type	Suggested lot number	Expiry date	Quantity
Shipment 1	Active	Lot 1	1-Oct-20	5
Shipment 1	Active	Lot 2	31-Dec-21	35
Shipment 1	Placebo	Lot 1	1-Oct-20	5
Shipment 1	Placebo	Lot 2	31-Dec-21	35