Advanced Shipping Notice: what it is? Why it’s an important innovation

Advanced Shipping Notice, shortened as ASN, is the electronic notification in EDI format (Electronic Data Interchange) which provides the recipient or buyer of a given commodity with a series of information regarding the contents of a shipment. The peculiarity of the ASN is given by the presence of various levels of detail and an ordered flexibility, as well it’s able to provide information on shipping operations way before the delivery.

With the spreading of the Advanced Shipping Notice — and Advanced Shipping Notice software like Gerp — the costs of delivery operations have decreased by 40%. Furthermore, its data are more accurate and immediate. In case of errors there is the possibility to reassign the goods for next shipments. The recipient also receives an immediate feedback on the outcome of the delivery.

Furthermore, the Advanced Shipping Notice can be used to pay suppliers via ERP software, through which it’s possible to print company labels on each container and notify in EDI format any inequality. In this way it is possible to avoid the mistakes that result from manual management of documents.

In many cases the ASN is provided by the logistics company that makes deliveries. The majority of the buyers nowadays do not accept a shipment without it. This because of the many improvements brought in warehouses and distribution centers for the receiving process: the ASN alerts the buyer if the supplier is unable to fully deliver the goods. So the buyer can plan and make decisions to ensure that there are no interruptions in the supply chain.

The ASN was born as a response to the craving to reduce errors in the delivery phase of shipped and then delivered goods, especially in the B2B (business to business) branch in the industry 4.0 environment.

Among the data included in the ASN electronic document we could find the following: number and date of dispatch, date and conditions of delivery, information such as address and transport conditions, typology of goods, quantity, serial number and lot of the products, type of packaging, SSCC or GSI 128 codes.

You can find below a table with a sample content of an ASN notification, which is usually sent in EDI or XML (extensible markup language) formats.