Setting Up a Diverter

1) Pick your diverter day

Diverter orders will only be generated one day a week. Choose the day you’d like to approve the diverter orders. Picking the diverter day determines the deadline for the diverter to send us their weekly file. As an example, you may pick Tuesday as your diverter day. This means we would expect you to approve your diverter orders on Tuesday a majority of the time. Yes you could approve on another day, but the diverter is less likely to have all of the products available the longer you wait to order.

2) Decide which diverters you want to set up

We have contacts at diverter sites we have worked with at other K3S customer sites if you need info (Quality King, Victory, Supreme, Purity). If you want to use a diverter we have not worked with before, just a heads up it will take a little longer to iron out file formatting, etc.

3) Set up the supplier ID

Set up the Supplier ID in the host ERP system, and tell K3S the supplier ID so we can set it up in K3S. Suppliers have to be manually added in K3S due to their unique settings.

SPECIAL NOTE: Do not assign any products under the diverter supplier ID in your ERP. K3S can not have products assigned to a diverter. Products must live under a ‘regular’ supplier.

4) Transmit the weekly file to the exchange site

There are two steps to getting a diverter’s weekly file imported into K3S. First, the customer will set up a process to receive the file from the diverter. There are lots of possibilities on how to receive the file. Ideally the diverter sends the file directly to a folder on your server or to an FTP site if you all already have one that you use. Another possibility is someone could be trained to take an email attachment and load on to your server, but this is not recommend this as a long term solution. Second, the customer will transmit the file to the diverter folder at the exchange site.

The diverter folder is one of the four folders on your SFTP account — see K3S Application Integration for the folder layout, and SFTP on IBM i if you are sending from an IBM i.

Technical Notes

A) Add Supplier Set up the diverter in Supplier Settings. When adding a new supplier, you will need to enter the Supplier ID into the Supplier field, the name of the diverter into the Name field, and also select in the drop down that it is an alternative source.

B) Determine K_ALSTRC file Determine the physical file that will hold the weekly offerings.

There are 15 files available to use from file name K_ALTSRC01 through K_ALTSRC15. More files can be established if you will be buying from more than 15 sources. These files are located in library K3S_5DTA and are flat files with 80 bytes records. If this is the first alternate source supplier you are setting up, then use the first file called K_ALTSRC01.

What K3S does from here

The rest of the setup happens on the K3S side: importing the weekly file from the exchange site, mapping the diverter’s layout to the fields K3S expects, setting the diverter day on the processing schedule, and enabling diverter order building in the night job. K3S configures and tests all of it with you before the first live run.

What we need from you is the diverter’s weekly file in a consistent layout. See Alternate Source (Diverter) Setup for examples of the layouts diverters commonly send, and the field positions K3S maps them from.