Store and Shipping Staging Process| Standard Retail Outbound Needs | Approach to D365 for Commerce with Adv WH Mgmt

Hi Guys, Hope you have read my previous post where we discussed about one of those unique requirements of Retail Warehousing, but it’s not as common as some of the other things such as personalization or manifesting, and that is Auditing. In this blog, we are going to discuss about how the cartons get to the brick-and-mortar stores. After packing, what needs to happen is the products or the cartons that are going to a particular store will be brought to a store staging area. There will be one pallet set up or a couple pallets for every store that’s shipping the next day. So then at the end of the day, they’ll be brought down to the shipping staging area in front of the door where they’re going to load. So you really have two staging areas for product that’s going to the stores:

• Store Staging Area
• Shipping Staging Area.

If you look at the blueprint, the areas we’re going to see are here in the store staging area and then here down near the dock where they’re actually loading those store cartons onto trucks going to the stores are the shipping staging area.

Store Staging and Shipping Staging Processes

Before we go into a lot of details, let me make something perfectly clear about shipping to the stores using your own trucks or via LTL or something like that. In this little case study we’ve portrayed this idea that it’s common. But in reality you have to get to a certain scale before it really makes sense. What most retailers do in the early days until they have, you know, 100 or 200 stores or more is they ship to the store using the small parcel services instead of actually building a load and shipping it via their own trucks or via a less than truckload carrier. So the process where you take these things to store staging and then taking them to a shipping staging area does not happen at a lot of retailers, only at some of the larger ones. But nonetheless it could be a requirement that you encounter. And in certain areas of the world, this can be more common just because of transportation and population density is different. So just keep that in mind as we go through the details of this process.

So to understand how this works, let’s go back to our CAD layout and look at how things go. As we have seen in Picking, the store orders will generally be picked over here someplace inside of the piece-picking area (Follow green line). Then they’re going to be dropped off at a packing station. The person will pack out the store carton. And then it needs to get married with other cartons that are going to go to that store because you want them all on the same truck (Follow red line).

So what we have up here in the upper right-hand corner is what we call the store staging area (tagged as Tomorrow). The store staging area is used to accumulate all the cartons going to the stores that you’re going to ship to tomorrow, while the area down is for the stores that you’re going to ship to today.

So what you should expect to see happen is that at the end of the day, once all of the cartons have been distributed to the store staging locations and, again, every carton should probably have a label printed out in the packing area that identifies what store that particular carton is going to go to, so that this person, when she gets over to the store staging area, can look at that and just put it on the pallet and scan it onto the pallet that’s going to that particular store without any difficulty.

But then at the end of the day, what you’ll need to do is move all of the store cartons, or the pallets containing store cartons, from that store staging area down to the door where they’re going to load. And some places will require that a license plate get attached to that pallet before it moves down to the door that identifies what stop it is associated with, because you might have a truck that’s going to visit two markets.

You might have stuff going to the Atlanta market and the Miami market on the same truck. So you want to load the Miami stuff first because it’s the second stop and you want to load the first stop, the Atlanta stuff, last. So they’ll ask for a label kind of like this that will identify where on the truck that particular pallet needs to go in terms of what stop it’s associated and what route it’s associated with, and as well as what door it’s going to load at. So there’s some additional information that may be required when the operator comes to pick up a pallet that they’re going to move it to the dock. They may have to have a portable printer that prints this out or maybe they can drive by a printer or something nearby that they can pick up that label and attach it to the pallet as they drive towards the dock or something. But some places will require that there’s some sort of pallet label that identifies the route, stop, and door on it.

I hope you got a better understanding from a requirements perspective about Store staging and Shipping staging process, that’s what you should expect a Retail Warehouse manager to be asking about.

In the next blog, we’re going to look at a very unique Retail Warehousing concept called flow through distribution or case flow through.

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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