How D365 FO Meets Retail Outbound Needs | Order Entry and Wave Planning | Approach to D365 for Commerce with Adv WH Mgmt

Hi Guys, Welcome to another series where we will discuss how D365 FO complies with Retail Outbound requirements that we outlined in our previous series of Retail Outbound needs for direct to consumer and brick and mortar retailers and we will also talk a little bit about what sort of enhancements or augmentation partners might need to fit D365 FO more closely to the Outbound side of a Retail Warehouse operation.

In this series you should see:

• How well D365 FO warehouse management meets the needs of most Retail Warehouses. There are a few things to really pay attention that show how D365 FO meets these needs. And you need to be familiar with these things so you can better be prepared to explain the D365 FO value proposition as well as the physical processes that go on inside the DC around using D365 FO on a day-to-day basis. So we’re going to discuss about things like:
  • How you actually use the order characteristics and the order entry system like pool to drive orders into waves at the appropriate time so we get stuff that’s separated and rushed versus normal orders.
  • We’ll discuss about how we can create demand-based replenishments when there are spikes in demand and how that works and how we can select out locations that are separate from the fixed pick location for that stock to flow into.
  • And we’ll also discuss about how cluster picking is a two-step process. Some people might expect it to be a one step.
• And then we’ll also spend some discuss about how partners can augment the base outbound functionality to meet retailer needs even more closely in a couple of different areas.

So those are the two objectives for this series. So lets start our journey with the Order Entry and Wave planning process and how we meet this requirement in D365 FO.

Order Entry and Wave Planning

So here is the process flow for the outbound side of a typical Retail Warehouse that is a multichannel retailer with e-commerce as well as stores, and it’s going to serve as our roadmap for getting through this series. Before each section that we go through, we are going to see where we are on the overall roadmap, so you can understand what you’re about to see next.

In this blog we are going to concentrate at the very beginning. We are going to discuss about the wave planning and the order entry process. We are not going to spend a lot of time on order entry because it’s really not part of the warehouse management module. But it is important to say a few words about it because when orders get entered they need to be characterized in such a way that they will flow down into the warehouse management system and get slotted into waves of a particular type. So we’ll show that when we enter a few orders, and then we’ll actually show the process of reserving inventory against them, processing those waves and creating the picks and so forth that go along with any kind of processing inside the Retail Warehouse, whether it’s a consumer order or a store order. So let’s see how D365 FO supports order entry and wave planning for a retailer.

We will see by creating an order and flowing it into the warehouse management module to show how orders need to be lined up in waves of a particular type. As we discussed in our earlier blog, one of the requirements is that product or orders need to be associated with waves that have a virtual warehouse tied to them. So let us see how we can do that with D365 FO.

Navigate to Sale and Marketing > Sales orders > All Sales orders and we are going to create an order here. Start off with selecting the Customer.

Now enter in some general information about this order. We need to indicate what kind of order it is. And we are using the pool to classify what type of order it is. And there’s two different types of pools that are really important. One is a normal order, and one is a rush order. So we are going to use that pool field because this is a rush order. This customer would like this shipped to her house overnight, so we are going to choose Rush.

And this is going to be used later on by the warehouse management system to get this order into the correct wave. It’s also an order that is coming in through the internet, so I will mark that as e-commerce as the source. So I also need to tell it what DC I want to use to fill this order, so it’s going to be warehouse 26.

So I enter in the order header information, and now it’s going to ask me what particular product does the customer want to order? So we are going to enter one unit of Mesh BMX Gloves and it also will be one unit of the Soundbar that we are also going to order. So the automatic reservation is already setup and the added items are already reserved against the inventory.

The next step in the process is we need to send it down into the warehouse because right now it’s just sitting in the the sales order entry area. So on the Warehouse Action pane, click on Release to warehouse. And this is actually sending it down. It will give you a message saying there’s been a shipment created. And it’s also been slotted, this shipment, into wave number USRT-000000009. So we have shipment number USRT-000017 now in wave number USRT-000000009.

It means it went down, it allocated, it’s ready to go. Navigate to Warehouse Management > Shipments > Open Shipments. So we have got one order of the new Mesh BMX Gloves and Soundbar.

So now the next typical process is to release this wave to actually generate the picking work to pick this order, or we need to process the wave, is the terminology in D365 FO. To do that click on the wave ID and it brings up the wave form. Here you see the Shipment USRT-000017 is under the Wave lines.

So now we are in a position that we can release this, but before we will release the other orders that will be in the same wave. Suppose we have few more Rush orders waiting to be waved. We will select these 3 orders and click on Release to Warehouse.

It has created three shipments. Notice how it’s added them all into wave number USRT-000000009. That’s the rush wave. Every rush order will go into the rush wave until we process that rush wave. So now we’ve got four orders all together in the rush wave number USRT-000000009.

We will go back to the wave form, and you can see wave number USRT-000000009 has multiple shipments. It’s time to create those picks, so to do that we press the Process button.

And there it is, so work has been created, so let’s go and see that work. Navigate to Warehouse management > Work > Outbound > Open Sales work. And we’ll see that we’ve now got work associated with these four orders. And they all have separate work IDs, but they’ve all been dropped as a result of processing that wave.

So we now have picks on the floor that we can complete. That shows essentially how the process of orders being entered get into waves, and those waves are lined up with being either rush waves or normal waves. We could’ve value-added services wave for personalization product as well. But we’ve got to maintain two different or three different types of waves, and as the orders accumulate you release them, just as we did. So D365 FO can support that whole stream of activity from order entry to wave planning to creation of the picks.

The next step in the process will be to actually cluster pick those orders which we will see in our next blog.

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