When a Line is Not a Line

Supply Chain Terms and Terminology can get confusing.

How?

Take the Term line. What is a line?

Your customer sends your sales department a purchase order for twenty different products you sell. Each product on the PO is a PO Line.

Your customer service group enters the PO into your order management system to create a Sales Order. Each item in the order becomes an SO Line.

The SO drops into your Warehouse Management System, and each item is a WO line.

Your WMS prints the pick tickets, creating a line for each item that is in stock—these are Pick Lines.

Your warehouse picks and ships the product, creating an invoice. Each item on the invoice is an Invoice Line.

They should be all the same, right? Not in some systems. In fact, in many cases one kind of line can be more or less than another. Confused? Let’s look at an example.

Your customer sends a PO with twenty PO lines. They have not done a good job maintaining their system, and they ordered a product that your company does not carry anymore, so the Sale Order only has nineteen SO Lines.

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