Retail Outbound Partner Augmented Features in D365 | Approach to D365 for Commerce with Adv WH Mgmt

Hi Guys, I hope you have read my previous post where we have understood the manifesting function and how it can be enabled or re-enabled in D365 FO to use it for one of the options available for manifestation. In this blog, we now need to discuss those areas where partner support will be important. That is as far as to fully meet the needs of the outbound side of a Retail Warehouse.

The areas where this will occur are marked in yellow in our process flow diagram for the Outbound side of Retail Warehouse.

Personalization Area

Let’s start with the personalization area. As indicated it is possible to get order lines that require some sort of personalization, and it’s possible in the current base D365 FO to get those items picked and over to the personalization area. However, once they get there there is no real base logic for communicating what it is that needs to be personalized or how should they be personalized, like the person’s name that needs to be monogrammed into a shirt or initials that need to be monogrammed into a shirt. So that’s where we’re going to require some partner help to extend the base product to support fully what retailers will expect in this area. It is good to point out further that there is a logic that you can build into D365 FO out-of-the-box to get it out of the personalization area and into packing. So getting it there and getting it out are supported. It’s what goes on inside there that is going to require some partner help.

Store Staging Area

Next, we need to see about consolidating cartons going to a store, in a store staging area. If you’ll recall the Store Staging business process blog, today we should be picking and packing and then staging those things that are going to the store in the store staging area. And then the following day or early in the morning tomorrow, we will move the cartons out of here into what we call the shipping staging area.

Well, you can create a work template that makes it look like you could do this like above we’ve got the picking and it’s going to packing and then from packing it’s going to store staging, that work template looks like it’ll work, but when you actually get the pick merchandise to the packing station you end up with an error. So what this really means is you can’t really use D365 FO to move a packed, store-bound carton from packing to store staging. This whole process of getting it here and then moving it to shipping staging and then loading, all that is going to have to be manual, done outside of systems support. That is just really isn’t anything there in D365 FO with my knowledge on the Warehouse management module, and I suspect it may be really difficult for a partner to kind of facilitate that, even if they would like to. So just keep in mind that store-bound cartons really are just considered shipped after the packing process is complete.

Audit Area

Now let’s see the audit area. There is auditing the e-commerce orders, and there’s also auditing of the store orders that many retailers want to do. There really is no audit form that’s set up in the base D365 FO warehouse management module, so we can’t see any of that. But we will say that one alternative is to just execute the entire audit process, including selection in the audit itself, kind of outside the system. For example, one could randomly grab a carton that comes off of packing and send it straight over to the audit desk, maybe just reach down into one of those bins and grab out a package, tear it open, and then you could then compare the contents of that particular package. If we go to the shipments ready to ship form, in the warehouse management, it’ll show what is actually supposed to be in a given shipment.

And so you can see that they’re supposed to be one unit of G0011, one unit of the T0012. And you can look there and visually check it. You could keep the results of these audits in an Excel spreadsheet so you can provide pickers and packers feedback on their accuracy. So you can do that, but it would have to be done outside of the system.

The other option is to create some little screen that lets the audit operator actually do kind of a grocery scan of these products that are inside of a shipment, so that, like in the packing screen, if something’s not supposed to be there it will beep at you or flash something on the screen and tell you, hey, this is an overpack. It’s not supposed to be in with this order, etc. So that is another alternative where partner support could augment the base product and provide an audit screen that could be useful for both e-commerce as well as store-bound orders.

Summary

I hope you see how D365 FO warehouse management can comply with most of the outbound requirements of a Retail Warehouse.

• We’ve seen how it can be used to wave the orders by order type, separating them off in terms of rush versus fast or normal orders.
• We’ve seen you can generate demand replenishments to meet spikes in demand planning time.
• We’ve seen how you can cluster pick multiple orders at one time to reduce the walking and travel distance in a warehouse.
• And then after picking we’ve seen how you can pack those orders out and ship them.
• We’ve also seen how partners can build on the capabilities of the D365 FO by providing code to facilitate a couple of areas on the outbound process flow.
• We discussed how providing code to actually facilitate the personalization process, we can get it to the personalization area, but what happens there is something we probably should consider using a partner capability to enhance.
• We discussed if a particular customer wants to separate off the manifesting process and run that, that’s probably something that would require some partner expertise.
• And towards the tail end, even after something is packed, if you want to maintain some quality metrics on the accuracy of packers and pickers, you may want to choose to have packages periodically opened up and double-checked to make sure that what’s really in there is really supposed to be in there. We also discussed how that might be an area where partners could augment the base code to provide a more rich audit experience if a customer so desires.

I hope as a result of this series you now feel more confident speaking to a Retail Warehouse manager, how D365 FO supports the outbound side of Retail Warehouses.

Feel free to reach out for any clarifications. If you like my blog posts then comment and subscribe to the blogs.

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