Work management overview

Warehouse Management incorporates extensive pick management facilities. These allow warehouse personnel to manage their own operations with the tools provided and to measure performance.

Business pick plans can be defined within customer service prior to releasing orders to the warehouse. If orders are released and there is a problem the warehouse has the ability to send a batch of orders (or an individual order) back to customer service for correction. The order will be “reversed” and have a status of K.

Within the warehouse, personnel can define their own warehouse pick plans which allow great flexibility in selecting which orders to pick when. For example, selection can be based on a region, a carrier or priority or the orders. If another selection is run and the previous selection of that same condition is still in process, the new run details will add on.

Management can set pick priorities and sequences. Orders can be released based on many criteria, including by number of orders, lines or units, depending on the devices and warehouse personnel available.

If required, orders can be picked directly from bulk for large or pallet orders. Many other timesaving facilities are available including the facility to pick many small orders together in batches on a tote or similar device and to take them to a sorting and labeling station. This is particularly useful when samples of new release titles need to be dispatched quickly to encourage rapid adoption.

The pick plans described above can be set using a wide range of order, customer or description based criteria. Virtually every field on the customer, description and order Masterfiles can be used in setting up a pick plan. For example, there can be plans to meet the arrival of a particular carrier, for a particular part of the country, for a particular description or range of descriptions, for a specific customer or group of customers, for a weight limit for each order and any combination of the above. These plans can be sorted reused modified and copied for reuse or modified for on-off use.  This provides warehouse personnel with great flexibility in planning what orders to pick when and totally eliminates the need to manually sort picking slips.

Automatic replenishments can be initiated against many various criteria. At the highest level, replenishments are generated either for only those titles needed to fulfill orders, or for all locations with low stock levels.

For order replenishment the process automatically analyses all titles within the selected groups of orders to determine if the picking locations contain sufficient stock to fulfill all orders.  Any titles with insufficient stock are automatically added to the replenishment run with the required quantity to satisfy the orders.

Location replenishment automatically analyses all locations within a group of locations against minimum stock levels for each title, optionally allowing also for outstanding order quantities, and orders replenishment stock to the maximum quantity for each location.

By regularly running order replenishments for orders not released, pick location stockouts and the consequent picking delays can be reduced or eliminated. Location replenishments can be run at lower frequency to replenish title pick locations for titles without current orders.

A further beneficial aspect of the replenishment system is clean-up, which creates stock movements to remove excess stock of titles or stock from obsolete locations.

Inventory management overview

Process flow

Warehousing statuses

Release orders to pick