Case Putaway into Bulk Business Process| Standard Retail Inbound Needs | Approach to D365 for Commerce with Adv WH Mgmt

Hi Guys, Hope you have read my previous post on Prep or Value added services Area Process about what are the two ways product gets to Prep and what has to happen or how can you get it and divert it to the prep or inbound value-added services area. In this blog, we will discuss about the tail end of Retail Inbound process that when you put stuff away, is there something that’s unique about how that needs to be done.

All right. We’re now at the tail end of our Retail inbound journey through a Retail Warehouse. The last stop on this tour is going to talk about what happens to the vast majority of the cartons that come in off the container. Most of them will go straight back into the bulk storage area. And, in particular, they’ll go back and get put away in the case putaway area within the bulk storage area. There is some unique functionality that need to support that process. It’s also really important to understand what the physical process should be and what it tends not to be or, rather, what it tends to be because those have system implications for how you set up D36 F&O Warehouse management. So let me take you to the case putaway area and show you what’s going on and then talk about some of the risks associated with that process.

Putaway has a unique requirement that we need to talk about, and that is what the system doesn’t direct where the cases go. It’s up to the discretion of the operator. And this is for a good reason. Let us look at the operator doing the putaway.

Well, he has four or five cases on his pallet. If the system tells him where to put those, it’s very possible that it will send him to four or five different locations, and he’ll have to go up or down four or five different times. If you leave it to him to decide where those go, he’s going to do it smart. He’s going to look for a series of locations that are right next to each other that are open. So he only has to go up one time, and then he can put those four or five cases into those four or five adjacent locations, and he can save a lot of time and a lot of labor doing that. That’s why retailers prefer user directed putaway instead of system directed. Now, there is one risk associated with this process that you need to guard against. But it’s not that big of a risk, and you’ll be able to mitigate any possible problems that might result from it. But it is something that we need to talk about.

The Goal of this Putaway Process

Before I talk about the risks of this process, let me take a step backwards and talk about the goals. Obviously, one of the goals of the putaway process needs to be to minimize travel and, hence, the costs associated with putaway. That is an obvious goal. And everybody should be aware of it that’s either selling to a retailer or that’s implementing a system for them. But the other goal that may be less obvious, unless you work in Retail Warehouses, is how accurate the inventory needs to be back in the case storage area. Most retailers have an expectation that the location accuracy will be something like 99.5 percent or better. This means if you go to a thousand locations, no more than five of them would have the wrong product in it. When you think about it, that means there’s less tolerance for mistakes. This user directed putaway process turns out, somewhat dangerous and at odds at achieving this level of accuracy. And the operators need to be educated accordingly, and you need to set up D365 F&O Warehouse management accordingly to achieve these levels of accuracy. So let me talk about risk of this process.

Here is a crime. It’s not a felony, but it’s a procedural crime.

Finding the Victim

Let us see how can a crime committed back in the reserve area have any influence on the design of the palletizing step. Well, the issue is being able to find that missing case or finding the victim is almost impossible if you don’t scan the palletizing process. When Warehouse operator loses that case in the back, the receiving dock looks something like this.

I mean, there’s stuff all over the place. There’s no way to detect what he’s done at that point. But if you wait long enough, at the end of the day, when everything has been put away, the dock will look something like this.

It will be essentially empty, except for stacks of empty pallets that are positioned there to be used for the following day. If you look into the system, however, that receiving dock isn’t really empty. There’s something there. Although when you look at the actual dock, physically, it’s not there. It’s a ghost case. But you can find out information about that case. I mean, you can look it up. It will tell you the location is in receiving – RECV.

It will give you the license plate, 000345991 and what the SKU was. And you know that this is a case that’s been lost by someone, somewhere in the warehouse. But you don’t know anything else about that case if you’re not scanning to the palletizing location. If all you’re doing is looking at that label and deciding what pallet to put it on and nothing more, there’s no other record as to where that case was going. Especially in D365 F&O. So what you need to do is insist on people to scan at the palletizing step, because if you did that, then you would see different information. It would look something like this.

It would show you the staging location (that we have seen in our previous post) R2QCO1, and you know that R2QCO1 is a palletizing location for product going to QC. So you know that it got put on a pallet going to QC so you can go there and check. Now, what happens if it says it was going back into the bulk area? Well, that bulk area is gigantic. It has scores of aisles, potentially, back there that you could search. How do you know where it is then? Well, in that situation, what you would do is you would look for other cases that were palletized at roughly — going to the same location at roughly the same time, and then you go back and you see where were those cases put into storage, because eight out of the ten times, the missing case that has lost will be somewhere nearby those other cases that it was traveling with. And this is why you really need to scan at the palletizing step.

Now, you might wonder why make a big deal out of this? Because some Retail Warehouse managers may not like the fact that in D365 F&O, we have to scan at the palletizing step. But there’s some real benefits, as we have just seen, that you can show them to justify why we think we want to do it.

I hope this blog clears the understanding why the Case put away process is unique and the goals and risks that are associated with implementing the Case putaway location into D365 F&O Warehouse management.

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