Manifesting Business 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 another most important process in the Outbound side of a Retail Warehouse which is similar to Picking because it also consumes a lot of labor and that is Packing. In this blog, we are going to discuss about the last step in the process of shipping a carton via small parcel in the Outbound side of a Retail Warehouse and that is Manifesting. In order to ship something on small parcel, you have to have a label on it, you have to tell them how much it weighs, etc. All of this information is captured at the manifesting workstation.

If you look at the blueprint, manifesting tends to occur just after packing. So after a box is packed out, it will be manifested. Some places like to integrate the manifesting step with the packing step. So they don’t have a separate manifesting station. But this requires you to spend more money on capital equipment like printers and scales and everything. And it’s not necessarily the preferred way to go. A lot of people like to do it as a separate step.

Now, something important to note is that not everything gets manifested that comes through packing. If you happen to have orders that are being shipped to a store on store trucks, they bypass manifesting and go straight to store staging. But if you’re using small parcel carriers to ship product to your stores, then they, too, will go through manifesting. So it’s not just e-commerce orders, it could be the brick-and-mortars orders as well if you’re a smaller brick-and-mortar retailer. Only the larger brick-and-mortar retailers will actually ship to their own stores using LTL or their own trucks. So let’s go down on the floor and look at the manifesting process so that you can better understand what exactly is involved.

So the manifesting station is literally the last stop for most cartons and boxes before they go out of the warehouse. And manifesting is the process of creating a shipping label that you need to have on a box in order for the transportation carrier to get it to that consumer. Let us understand some of the devices that are at a manifesting station, and then lets see how to manifest a package.

If you look here, in order to produce that label, we need to know how much that package weighs. So we have a scale that’s been interfaced to a computer so that when we put the package on the scale in a moment it communicates that weight to the computer. As we’re trying to get a label, we also have a label printer. And some retailers will actually put this equipment at every packing station so that manifesting happens immediately after an order is packed. But then you have so spend the money to setup a manifesting station.

Now let us see what’s involved in manifesting. So you grab a package, you put it on the scale, you scan the package. You got to wait a second as it weighs the package, communicates that to the computer, and then a label will print out. You apply that label to the package. And so now it’s ready to ship.

It’s got the carrier compliance label and address information. You just have to look at it and see which transportation carrier is going to take it, and then you throw it into the bin. And as soon as that bin gets full, they’ll move it onto a truck and it will be shipped to a consumer home. That’s all there is to manifesting.

Manifesting Requirements | Weighing a Package

Let’s talk about some of the particularly important, requirements relative to manifesting. And the first of those is how are we going to get the weight of the package. As we seen above, we’re getting it off of a live scale that’s interfaced to the warehouse management system. But that’s not always the case.

Key the Weight

One of them is that the scale sits on the side and you have to actually hand key the weight into the system. And this happens at places that don’t want to spend a lot of money on a scale.

They don’t want to have a scale with an RS232 interface, they just want to be able to buy a cheap scale at the local office supply store and get going. They’re willing to spend the labor to key it in.

Interface to an electronic scale

Of course, there are most of the companies where they want that scale interfaced into the warehouse management system. And this isn’t a fancy interface, this is just usually a keyboard wedge where you put it on the scale and you push a button and it simulates the keystrokes of actually typing it into the field. But you have to get that set up, it’s more expensive.

Use estimated weight of the items in the box

And then finally there are some firms that don’t even want to do any weighing at all. And these people do this because they want to avoid pretty much most of the manifesting step. They’ll print out the carrier compliance label maybe in packing, apply it to the package and just ship it. They won’t send it to this type of a workstation to get scanned or to get weighed. They will use the individual elemental weights of the units that were ordered to calculate a weight and give that to the small parcel carriers. Now, this is frowned upon by many of the small parcel carriers because it can be inaccurate, especially if you don’t have a good process around capturing weights and measures and that kinds of things. So they may not want to have a manifesting step at all. They may want to just build the carrier compliance label printing into the packing process as a result.

So you need to explore how the client or the customer wants to obtain that weight and get it into the warehouse management system when you talk about their manifesting requirements.

Manifesting Requirements | Carrier Interface

Package Info Required

The biggest issue around manifesting is the carrier interface. In order to get a label from the carrier that’s going to carry the package to the consumer, you have to tell them:

• who is it going to
• how much does it weigh
• how big is the box

Somehow that information has to get to the small parcel carrier before they’ll give you the label that you need to print. And so there are Web services and other things like that, that are offered by most of these carriers that you can talk to, to get that information. So you’ll need to make sure that they have all those interfaces set up and you’ll have to interface to the third-party system.

Don’t want to key any address information

So what’s really important is to keep in mind that you don’t want someone at the manifesting station having to key that information into the carrier system because the carriers do have a workstation that will produce these labels but to get them you have to have information about the package. So you don’t want the manifesting person having to key that information in, you want it to flow over naturally just by scanning the invoice number on the outside of the package and so automatically it comes in and then it gets weighed and everything else. That’s if you’re going to use the carrier system to do the actual manifesting as opposed to trying to do it within, say, D365 FO or in a third-party product.

Interface to one or multiple carriers | Rate shopping

Finally, keep in mind that there are some e-commerce companies and retailers that want the capability to rate shop in the manifesting area. What they mean by this is they may have contracts with two or three different small parcel carriers, and what they want the software to do is to choose the cheapest option amongst those two or three to ship this particular package. So you have all the same requirements that you had up front. You’ve got to be able to capture the weight of the package, you’ve got to have the information about who it’s going to and the size of the box and all the other stuff flowing over, but then you have this added requirement that it then takes that information and goes out and figures out which of the two or three carriers that you use is best suited to ship this package to this particular destination.

So you got those three options you’ve got to consider. So I hope you got a better understanding from a requirements perspective about Manifesting process and different requirements of Manifesting, that’s what you should expect a Retail Warehouse manager to be asking about.

In the next blog, we’re going to look at 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.

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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