How Can We Save More Picker Time? | Approach to D365 for Commerce with Adv WH Mgmt

Hi Guys, In our previous blog we saw the most important or most significant way that you can help a Retail Warehouse operation reduce its costs by figuring out better ways to batch orders in such a way that they travel less. In this blog, we are going to see another way that you can save picker time with some base out-of-the-box but unusual functionality from D365 FO. What many people don’t realize is that pickers aren’t always working. Depends on the facility, but some facilities, they can be waiting around a lot.

Around 10 percent, 15 percent or more is not that unusual. Especially if it’s an e-commerce operation, because e-commerce tends to have these spikes in demands, some other things that will make more sense that lead to people waiting around is how the picker can be stuck waiting or wasting time. Imagine we’ve got these soap bottles here. And the Pick Face that’s dedicated to these soap bottles.

Somebody in marketing comes up with the idea that we’re going to, if you’ll buy a soap bottle, will give you a something free. Well, with that kind of a promotion you can imagine the demand just takes off. And so as a result, in a wave they suddenly get orders for 168. And the Pick Face again only holds 24. For such situation in earlier day what they would do is they would set a reorder point for this Pick Face. And as the inventory in the Pick Face pick down, you know, it would get down to a threshold of, say, eight, they’d order another box. But they would release the whole 168 at wave planning time. So you can imagine what would happen.

I mean, they would pick this down to eight units. They’d order a replen. Eventually those eight units would be picked clean and they would be waiting on a replen and the picker would get to the Pick Face and say: Where is my stuff? The picker in turn would get there before the replenishment had shown up. And so what would they do?
They would wait. Or they would skip it and they’d go around and they’d have to come back and it wouldn’t be ready. So they would wait another minute or two and they’d ask the supervisor and the supervisor would eventually say, hey, put the order over to the side. So somebody else would have to start the order all over again and pick this once the replenishment was complete. You would see it just waste lots of time.

Well, somebody came up with the idea, and said, hey, look, when we have this situation where we’ve got a whole bunch more stuff ordered than we can fit into the Pick Face, let’s just do this: Let’s just let it all go; let’s generate all the replenishments when we drop the wave and generate the picks, because that way the pickers won’t have to sit around and wait on the replenishment. The replenishments will get there probably as fast as the pickers can pick it. It turned out that it got there even faster than the pickers could pick it because they had a new problem.

This is what it looked like. So in that scenario, we have 168 and we can only hold 24 in the Pick Face, we get these six boxes show up and there’s no way to put them into the Pick Face because the pickers haven’t picked all the stuff they needed yet to fit this stuff in. Especially if these six boxes came from the same location, they’re going to show up basically in reserve. They’re going to show up in the forward pick at the same time. So we had a new problem. And it also ends up wasting picker time. Let us see how that was.

So if this is our pick location, it’s dedicated, and it can only hold 24, when that guy shows up with the six boxes, what he did was he couldn’t put them in that Pick Face because there was no room for it. So instead what he did is he put it at the end of the aisle. Now, this creates what some people call the overstock problem or the end of the aisle problem, because, as you get more SKUs like this, that are going through this process, then you’ve got a potential really bad situation, because the restock guy may put it at the end of that aisle or that aisle is already full of stuff, he may put the replenishment at another aisle.

You can see what happens. First, it wastes a bunch of time because somebody’s going to have to bring this product back over to this Pick Face eventually. The second thing is, when it’s out, the picker has to go looking for it. So it may be anywhere. Who knows where it is. So as a result, pickers can waste lots of time when you have these wave-based replenishment going into a fixed pick location.

Well, somebody recently came up with the idea, and this has been put into D365 FO, and that is let’s create a new kind of pick location. Let’s not just have the fixed pick location, but let’s also have dynamic pick locations. These are locations that are not assigned to anybody.

And instead of putting the product at the end of the aisle, let’s put the extra boxes that won’t fit into these empty locations (marked as x). Then make sure the pickers get directed to go to those locations instead of the fixed pick location to pick that excess stock. And that way they never stop picking. And at the same time we don’t waste replenishment labor putting product at the end of the aisle then having to move it back. So it’s a really big savings. It’s something that is somewhat advanced. It’s an unusual feature. And it’s something that likely many retailers don’t have today, especially if they’re younger, kind of starting off type of operations. They probably won’t have functionality of this nature. So it will be really beneficial, if they’re doing e-commerce, to show them the benefits of having not just wave-based replenishment but wave-based replenishment with dynamic forward pick locations, because it will cut down on pickers standing around doing nothing but waiting on replenishments or seeking to find where the restock guy put the replenishment.

In our next blog we will take a look at putaway and Replenishment area and see how can we save cost over there.

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