EDI 940 Warehouse Shipping Order: The Complete Guide (2026)

Outsource your warehouse and you inherit a communication problem: the people picking your orders no longer sit inside your building or your ERP. The EDI 940 Warehouse Shipping Order is how that gap gets bridged. It travels from you to your 3PL and says, in structured form, ship this — these items, these quantities, to this consignee, by this date, with these special instructions.

Anatomy of a shipping order

The 940 belongs to the warehouse family of X12 documents, which uses its own segment vocabulary:

• W05 opens the document with your order number and the related reference numbers — critically, the customer's PO number, which must survive the round trip to the warehouse and back.
• N1 loops name the parties: ship-to (a retail DC, a store, or a consumer for drop-ship), the warehouse itself, and the bill-to.
• G62 dates tell the warehouse when the freight must ship or arrive — the field that keeps you inside a retailer's delivery window.
• W66 carries routing and carrier instructions, from a simple SCAC to full routing-guide detail.
• W01 detail lines list the items and quantities, with the identifiers the warehouse actually stocks against.

The document is only as good as the reference data inside it. If the item numbers in W01 don't match the warehouse's item master, or the ship-to code isn't in their system, the order stalls in an exception queue while the ship window burns.

The loop: 940 out, 945 back

The 940 never acts alone. It opens a loop that the 945 Warehouse Shipping Advice closes: warehouse receives the instruction, picks and ships, and reports back exactly what moved. That 945 is what you build the retailer's 856 ASN from — not the original order, because what shipped can differ from what you asked for. Inbound stock going into the warehouse runs on the parallel 943/944 pair, and together the four documents mean your inventory position and the 3PL's agree without anyone emailing spreadsheets.

Timing across the loop is where retail compliance lives or dies. The retailer's ASN clock doesn't pause because a 3PL is in the middle; a 940 sent late, or a 945 processed slowly, becomes a late ASN — and that's a deduction with your name on it, not the warehouse's.

Failure modes worth designing against

Most 940 problems are self-inflicted:

1. Batch delays. Sending 940s once nightly adds up to a day of latency before the warehouse even starts. Event-driven transmission — order ready, 940 out — recovers that time for free.
2. Reference numbers that don't round-trip. If the customer PO isn't carried on the 940, the 945 comes back unlinked, and building an accurate ASN becomes archaeology.
3. Unmapped changes. Customer changes an order after the 940 went out; nothing updates the warehouse. Cancellation-and-replace discipline for in-flight orders needs to be agreed with the 3PL, not improvised.

A fourth, quieter failure is unit-of-measure drift: your ERP thinks in eaches, the warehouse stocks cases, and a 940 that doesn't translate cleanly ships twelve times what anyone wanted. Unit and pack definitions belong in the map, validated on every order.

Connecting a 3PL without a project

Every 3PL speaks the warehouse document set slightly differently, which historically made connecting one a mapping project. EDISQ ships the 940/945 loop as a configured flow: your ERP's fulfillment request becomes the 940, the 945 posts back as a shipment confirmation, and the retailer-facing documents generate from it — the whole pattern is covered in our 3PL solution.

The economics stay flat as you scale. EDISQ pricing charges nothing until you're past 25 documents in a month, then from $0.50 per document with marginal tiers stepping down to $0.10 — and a 3PL connection carries no setup fee and no mapping fee; as an additional live trading partner it adds a flat $50/month. Your warehouse traffic costs what it measures, little more.

FAQ