Different types of Storage Locations | Retail Warehouse Blueprint| Approach to D365 for Commerce with Adv WH Mgmt

Hi Guys, I hope you have gone through my earlier posts on the Different Types of Staging Locations in a Retail Warehouse Blueprint. In this blog, we’re going to discuss the various types of Storage Locations that a Retail Warehouse needs.

Let us recall the Retail Warehouse blueprint that we saw in my previous post. It has multiple Storage location locations –

• Reserve (Bulk) Location
• Picking Location
• Processing Area Locations
  • Quality Control Area Locations
  • Prep Locations
  • Personalization Locations
  • Case Flow thru area Locations
  • Packing Area Location

Storage Locations for Reserve (Bulk)

Let us start the discussion from the storage locations that are needed for the Reserve product. This is the extra product that you might have of a given item. That is commonly put away in something that is referred to as the bulk storage area in the D365 F&O configuration. If you look at that bulk storage area on the layout, you’ll find that you typically need to set up two types of bulk storage locations – Case Storage and Pallet Storage.

Most of the area from the Bulk Storage is assigned to case storage because the vast majority of retailers store most of their Reserve products in case storage. But there is usually an aisle or two of pallet storage because there are few items that are ordered that are really large, like, a refrigerator or something that they sell. Or there are a few items that might be so popular that they buy the product in full pallet quantities. So you need to have a few locations set aside where you can actually store pallets in the rack. So you’ll typically divide that reserve storage area into those two zones, a case storage zone and a pallet storage zone.

Storage Locations for Picking

Now let us look at the next major storage zone or storage locations, that are used for picking. Sometimes this area is referred to as the active area. Some people call it the forward pick area.

This is the area where store orders and consumer orders are picked. When you look at this area, it tends to be divided into two sub-regions, and we have shaded them here in yellow and green, respectively.

The green area consists of what we call Fixed Pick Faces. These are locations that are dedicated to a specific SKU. Each location has only one SKU in it which is considered it’s home, for almost its entire existence. And so when the stock level goes low at that particular location, it will be replenished from Bulk, usually at night. When you configure such locations in D365 F&O, you manage them under Fixed locations setup.

The other region is where you have the dynamic pick faces. In Retail, there can be very wide swings in demand for certain items, especially if they get promoted on the web. And sometimes that demand exceeds the amount of space that you have allocated in the fixed pick face. So if you only have, room for 50 in the fixed pick face but you’ve got orders for a hundred, well, that’s when the dynamic pick faces come into play and so after the wave, you’ll actually replenish the extra stock that you need, from those dynamic pick faces.

So the dynamics change from day to day because whatever you bring in today will get picked clean by the end of the day, whereas the fixed pick faces are dedicated to specific SKUs and you will never change those except for maybe, you know, once a year or once a season or something like that. They’re fairly fixed.

Processing Area Locations

Now let us look at the processing area locations that you’ll need to set up in the Retail Warehouse Blueprint.

Processing areas are one of the distinguishing factors or characteristics of a Retail Warehouse compared to those warehouses in other verticals. We’re going to look at each one of these and what goes on in them a little bit. We’re also going to look at how the product needs to be diverted there. And then we’ll finish up with a discussion of what types of locations you need to set up in each of these different areas for them to work.

Quality Control Area Locations

Let’s start with the Quality Control Area. This is the area in which samples will be brought and evaluated and then sent back to storage, assuming that they pass the quality checks. So in the QC area, you would have a series of workbenches, and each workbench really needs to have two locations.

One will be for a product that’s brought on pallets that coming to the workstation that needs to be processed, and the other one will be the outbound staging location for a product that’s already been QCed. That’s where the QC associate will move product once they’ve gone through and processed the quality order. So you’ll need one of these usually for each workstation that is in the Retail Warehouse set up for QC.

Prep Locations

In the prep area or the inbound value-added service area, you’re going to need something similar to QC. You’ll have a series of desks, where people work, and you’ll need two locations for each of those desks. One will be for the inbound side of the prep workstation and the other one for the outbound side of the prep workstation.

Personalization Locations

Again, one of the distinguishing characteristics of a Retail Warehouse, compared to warehouses that serve other verticals, is the concept of personalization. You know, the idea of letting someone order something and then have the warehouse do something to that item that really makes it personal to that individual like hemming the pants to a certain length or monogramming it. So we will require to set up a series of locations where this type of activity can occur – the outbound value-added services area. It’s usually located someplace nearby packing, but not necessarily. But if you look at those, typical personalization workstations, they might look like this.

For example, Like this young lady sitting at a sewing machine that’s hemming pants. Or they have an embroidery machine or a monogramming machine of some sort that they’re working at. So what you’ll need for each of the personalization workstations is, an inbound staging location as well as an outbound staging location. And the product will be moved into the inbound staging location and then, once it’s been processed, it will be moved by the personalization employee to the outbound staging location.

Case Flow thru area Locations

Now we need to travel back to the inbound side of the building and take a look at one of D365 F&O’s most unique and powerful features, and that’s the support of case flow thru, or flow-thru distribution, or the concept of packages. All of this activity occurs in this zone close to the receiving dock that we call the case flow-thru area. Flow-thru distribution refers to having the vendors prepare cartons with mixed SKUs in them for the stores so that you don’t have to do any piece picking for those store orders. This usually is a great technique to reduce labor costs at the beginning of the season for brick and mortar stores, because all of the piece picking to build the pre-packs and packages can be done by the vendor at a much lower cost than, inside of your own Retail Warehouse. So when that product comes in, it comes from the receiving dock, and then the associates will scan it, and put it along with other merchandise going to a particular store inside of the case flow-thru area.

So you’ll see something like this, where each store will have its own pallet set up and a location for that pallet. And as these cases come in, they’ll be scanned and put that on respective store’s pallet. And each one of these will have a separate location within the case flow-thru zone. And then once a pallet of merchandise has been built and is complete, it will get moved to the store staging area for that particular store as we have seen in my previous blog.

Packing Area Location

To get most of the consumer orders and most of the store orders, that are prepared and ready to go in boxes, you’re going to need a packing area. And to have a packing area, you got to have packing stations. So you’ll have to have those set up in the system. Now, most retailers do not track the product from picking to a specific packing station. As you see here, this particular packing station has a number. This is packing station 61.

But in D365 F&O Warehouse management, it assumes there is just one giant packing area, and so you can only set up one location which is commonly called PACK. And so the product has to go there once it’s finished being picked, and you’ll have to set up one of those locations to facilitate the packing process in D365 F&O. And here we finish our journey through different Storage locations.

I hope this blog was successful in providing a proper visualization of a different Storage Locations in a Retail Warehouse so you can talk about during any D365 for Commerce implementation utilizing Advance Warehouse management.

In our next blog, we are going to look at the areas that are supported or not supported in the D365 F&O Warehouse management module and to get a better understanding of how far D365 F&O support Retail Warehouse blueprint.

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