Retail Outbound Demand Replenishment in D365 | Approach to D365 for Commerce with Adv WH Mgmt

Hi Guys, I hope you have read my previous post where we have seen the Cluster Picking process for multiple orders in D365 FO. In this blog, we’re going to see how the Demand Replenishment is done in D365 FO.

Occasionally the pick phase that’s normally dedicated to a particular item just doesn’t have enough stock in it to satisfy the demand in a given wave. It may be because an item has been just recently promoted and as a result, there’s a huge amount of unusual demand for that product. So the pick phase just isn’t big enough. When this happens, we’re going to try to get stock out of the back for that excess demand brought up to the forward pick area so that it can be picked pretty quickly. And we don’t want to have to go through the min/max process and setting up additional pick phases and everything else to do that. We want the system to handle it all automatically.

So we’re going to discuss demand replenishment, which is aimed at solving that problem. And we’ll see how through the wave-planning process it’ll bring the product up, and how D365 FO will slot that into a dynamic location. And we can pick it afterward.

There are two kinds of replenishment that the Retail Warehouses will need. One is min/max and the other is demand replenishment. Min/max, of course, is used to replenish the fixed picked locations. And demand is used when the inventory in the fix isn’t enough to satisfy the number of units that are in a wave. Well, min/max is pretty common, a lot of industries use that. But the dynamic, that’s something unique, probably mostly to retail. So we will see how demand replenishment works.

Let’s start off by just thinking about a product, and let’s just say we’re going to look at Soundbar. And Soundbar has a fixed pick location which is 26-01-1-02. Navigate to Warehouse management > Setup > Warehouse > Fixed locations.

Let us see how much inventory is in this location. Navigate to Warehouse management > Inquiries and reports > On-hand by location. We have one unit of inventory that’s available in that location right now. So if we order more than one unit in a wave, we are going to need a demand replenishment to be created.

So we have actually created two orders and they now are in a position to be released to the warehouse.

So we are going to select both of those, 012536 and 012537 order, and choose Release to warehouse.

So now we’ve got two shipments that have been created and they’re both being added to the same wave number USRT-000000022. So now we need to go in and process that wave.

Navigate the wave and you can see these multiple shipments in this wave. So what we want to do at this point is we’ve got to process this wave. So that’s going to create the picks as well as the replenishments, if there are any that are needed to support that wave.

Remember that for Soundbar we only have one unit right now in the forward pick location for that item, and yet in this wave, we are ordering two, each order ordered one unit. So we press process and it says, it’s created a replenishment wave.

It must have detected that it didn’t have enough inventory. And then it also says here that the picking work associated with one of the order have been frozen. You can’t execute that until the replenishment work is going to be completed. So let’s see this work that’s been created as a result of releasing this wave and the creation of this demand replenishment. So we are picking eight units from this reserve location 01-01(07)2 and bringing it up to a dynamic location, 01-01-1-01.

Now one of the requirements that is common for replenishment is that you must be able to round up the replenishments to full case quantities. We don’t want to send somebody over there to open up a box and grab eight units out. So what we need to do is we need to be able to verify that that has actually happened and the operator does not require to open a box and get only eight of these units. So let’s go look and see what’s in this particular location and verify that we’ve got the right one, or that we’ve got a full case quantity. Navigate to Warehouse management > Inquiries and reports > Physical On-hand inventory, select DC warehouse, and 26 location, for item Soundbar which is T0012 and yes indeed, there actually are multiple license plates there in that location because they must’ve stacked multiple boxes on top of each other.

But you can see the second one, for Soundbar, has indeed eight units in it, so it has done exactly like it was supposed to. It has rounded up the replenishment quantity to eight because that’s what’s in the box. Instead of asking us to go over there and pick one, because the wave only needs one, because we had one in the forward pick, so we really only needed one more unit to grab, to satisfy that wave. So it’s done exactly what we want it to do. It’s rounded up to full case quantities which is great. Let us see what happens for the picking work and how it’s created these tasks for the actual picking.

It’s figured out where those picks are going to come from. But if we try to grab that work order ID for the second-order which is blocked due to the Replenishment work attached to it and if we tried to create a cluster that has that order in it, you will see the error message. It says current work is frozen.

So it will not let anyone build a cluster for orders that still have replenishments that are outstanding. You have to wait until those replenishments are finished before you can continue.

So let’s execute those wave-based replenishments, and then we can see how we can start picking.

You can see here that we’ve got one task where we’ve got to pull from this location 01-01(07)2 and put it into dynamic location 01-01-1-01. What’s really important for making sure that all the replenishment tasks get picked in sequence before you start being directed to put them away, is that you need to group on the wave ID so that the whole replenishment process is driven off of the replenishment wave ID. So you need to have that in hand. So now we’ve got to go, we’ve given the replenishment operator the wave ID and said, hey, go pick replenishment wave USRT-000000024. So he gets into his mobile device, he goes to the Moves menu.

He clicks on Pull wave replenishment, and it asks what replenishment wave ID are you going to pull for? And we are going to put in what we got. So then it says, we need you to go over to this location and pull the box there. It tells us it’s got to have a box of eight. So we need to be able to find out what exactly is the license plate number for that location.

So we are going to go on over there to grab the license plate and scan. So now it tells us, please go over to the dynamic forward pick location, 01-01-1-01 and drop off our case of eight. And we’ve done that. We don’t have anything else to pull, so we are done with replenishment.

Now, because we’ve got the replenishments in place, we should have unfrozen the picks that were dependent on that replenishment. So now we should be able to go off and do our picking. So let’s just go over there and look and see the work IDs that we need for cluster picking.

And we’ve got USRT-000140 and USRT-000141, So we go back into outbound menu and click on Create Clusters for Picking. We scan the first work ID, which will be associated with tote number one. And our second one, which will be associated with tote number two. And we say we are done and click pass on picking.

So now, we’ve got a piece of paper or two pieces of paper that have been rubberbanded together and they are now in the system as a cluster. Navigate to Warehouse management > Work > Outbound > Work clusters. It’s cluster number USRT-000000013. So now we hand that little stack of paper along with the cluster-ID to a picker and say, hey, you can go out and pick these now because the replenishment tasks are done.

Let’s just prove that actually is true. So he goes into the cluster pick,

And enters the cluster number and we got our first pick. So we go off and make that pick from the dynamic location out of eight that is kept there, and it says it needs to go in position two, and then it tells us to go to forward pick area and pick another unit that needs to go in position one.

And then it sends us to our third pick location. So we pick two units. We put one of them in position one, and one of them in position two.

And so those two orders are in. It sends us to pack, so we haul our cart over to the packing station and park it there. And so that is dynamic demand replenishment. Note that it generated the demand replenishment when the forward pick location didn’t have enough in it to satisfy those two units of demand that were needed in the wave. And then when it did go looking for an extra case to bring forward, it brought a whole case, not a partial case, but a whole case of eight into the dynamic forward pick location. We could also configure D365 FO to pick all the orders out of dynamic location first and then the inventory in the fixed pick location, exactly like a retailer wants in a real Retail Warehouse. So that’s demand replenishment.

So I hope you got a better understanding of the Retail Outbound Replenishment operation in D365 FO, so it is easier for you when you go and implement the D365 FO Warehouse management module for the Retail Outbound processes.

In the next blog, we’re going to step further in the Retail Outbound process and see once the orders have been picked complete, it’s time to pack them out through the process of Packing.

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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