Outbound to your 3PL
EDI 940: the warehouse shipping order
The 940 is your instruction to a third-party warehouse: ship these items, in these quantities, to this destination, by this date. It exists for the supplier whose stock sits in somebody else's building.
When a retail order lands in your Odoo and a 3PL does the shipping, the 940 is how the order reaches their floor without anybody retyping it.
What the document carries
The items and quantities to ship, the ship-to, the dates, and the handling the destination demands: the packing structure and the labelling the retailer's guideline requires, passed through so the 3PL packs compliantly on your behalf.
That pass-through matters because the retailer holds you responsible for the carton their dock receives. The 940 is where their requirements are handed to the people doing the physical work.
How it leaves Odoo
The source is the delivery order Odoo creates when a sale confirms. Routed to a 3PL, that delivery becomes a 940 instead of a picking list on your own floor: same demand, different executor.
The configuration decisions are which warehouse in Odoo represents the 3PL, when the 940 fires, confirmation or a scheduled release, and what the 3PL is told about substitutions and shorts. Set once per warehouse relationship, then it runs.
Where it goes wrong
The 940 says what should happen, and a warehouse you do not operate decides what does. Stock counts drift between Odoo and their system, an item ships short without a word, or the retailer's labelling rules never made it into the instruction.
The discipline that catches all three is closing the loop: every 940 should be answered by a 945 saying what actually shipped, and the gap between the two is the report worth watching.
The rest of the set
One document never travels alone. The mandate that asks for this one names its siblings, and the questions repeat: direction, mapping, and what happens when it is late or wrong.
Every code in plain language: the X12 catalog. What a late or wrong document costs: chargebacks and deductions. Who mandates and how it is enforced: the US programmes and the Canadian ones. How the documents fit into purchasing, fulfilment and accounting: EDI across the supply chain.
Start with the letter
The Requirement Check takes two answers: who mandated you and where you stand today. You get back a plain readout of which documents that customer asks for and what has to change inside your Odoo. It is free and it commits you to nothing.
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