Advance shipping notices, and how much to trust one
A message that tells you a delivery is coming and what should be on it. Useful for planning the day. Still a claim by the supplier.
The short answer
An advance shipping notice, or ASN, is a message a supplier sends before a delivery arrives, listing what is being shipped and how it is packed. It lets you plan labour and dock time. It is written by the supplier before the truck leaves, so it describes what they intended to send rather than what is on the vehicle.
Written by Hamza Rivera, founder, dockcount. How these are checked.
An ASN arrives ahead of the goods. In larger supply chains it comes as a structured electronic message; in smaller ones it is an email saying “two pallets, Thursday”. Either way it is doing the same job, which is telling you something is coming and roughly what is in it.
What it is good for
- Knowing how many people you need at the bay on Thursday morning.
- Spotting that an order has shipped short before the truck arrives, while there is still time to chase it.
- Pulling up the right purchase order before the driver is standing in front of you.
What it is not
It is not a count. An ASN is generated from the supplier’s picking system, usually at the moment the load is released, and it inherits every error made upstream of that. If the picker put nine in the carton, the ASN will still say ten.
Put another way
A friend texts you their train gets in at six. That is genuinely useful, and you go to the station at six. It is still not evidence that they are on the train.
Worth knowing
An ASN that matches the delivery note exactly proves nothing at all, because both were printed from the same picking record. Two documents agreeing with each other is not the same as either of them agreeing with the pallet.
Using one without being led by it
The risk with a good ASN is that it makes the count feel like a formality. If the screen already says ten, the person counting is now looking for reasons to agree with it. That is the exact problem blind receiving exists to solve, and it is worth reading if your suppliers send accurate notices most of the time.
DockCount does this job on a phone at the bay: count a delivery against the order it was placed on, photograph anything wrong, and the record writes itself. Warehouse receiving software for a small dock.