Image Enabling The Supply Chain

  This best practice is about Returns ASN (Advance Shipment Notice).  We discussed about the ASN before and we articulated on how useful was the ASN in deployment scheduling and your were able to plan your work in the receiving area. You were also able to get upfront information as to what is going to hit your DC and you could even allocate inventory in terms of the location of the product and allocate inventory for some orders.  If you have a powerful  warehouse management system (WMS)  the returns station can also become powerful. Typically the way the returns process works is if a consumer or somebody wants to return the product, they call ahead and then get a return authorization number. This is the way how the return shipping works so that the returns department is aware they cannot just blindly return because nobody would know why this is showing up and what – needs to be done. That’s why it’s important for the person whoever is sending return to call ahea...

  This best practice is about making  replenishments  inside the warehouse. It is important to stay on the top off replenishments always in your warehouse. If you have just one shift that you are running it would help a lot. If you spend extra hours in the evening and then do the topping off all your active locations it will be helpful for the pickers in the next shift. In the next morning when the pickers come after all the locations will be full and they can start picking right away without wasting time in replenishments. If you have two shifts running either choose the second shift or have a third shift if possible and keep doing the top off replenishments. There are active replenishment locations and these active locations have Min and Max. Whenever your inventory falls below min, replenishments are going to get triggered or it will get triggered if there is an order that needs a lot of picks from a particular location. This will drive the location down which will tri...

  This warehouse best practice is called the directed putaway.  Putaway  is a process of moving the product after receiving at the receiving dock. The product gets received and either cases were built or the pallets were built and now these cases and pallets have to be put-away in their reserve location. The way it works is the product is moved from the receiving area to the reserve area in so many different ways.  The user will find the first open location and just stick the load there and that is called the suggested put-away, and this is not completely the user directed put-away. In the user-directed put-away, user just finds the hole and sticks the load there and it is a complete wrong way of putting the loads. It makes sense when the volume is so low, but in a high volume scenario you need to follow a systematic process directed put-away which makes a lot of sense because you could configure your rules, based on the segmentation of the products like consumer goo...

  If you are looking to upgrade your  WMS  or if you’re getting a new WMS or switching to another WMS or if this is your first time WMS, here’s the another feature to consider. This feature is called cartonization. Cartonization is done among the different carton box sizes that you have for your order, whatever items that are being shipped in that order, you find the smallest box that will hold these items of the order in a pretty tight fashion with enough dunnage. Cartonization helps you to reduce your transportation costs significantly and especially if you do a lot of parcels. If you do rate shopping between FedEx, UPS and USPS you could get even more savings. Cartonization has a lot of other capabilities such as nesting logic and there are a lot of things that come with that you could take advantage of. We had an interesting problem with one of our clients. Their WMS will figure out the fit of all the items in a small box but sometimes the operators would struggle to ...