Prep or VAS Business Process| Standard Retail Inbound Needs | Approach to D365 for Commerce with Adv WH Mgmt

Hi Guys, Hope you have read my previous post on Quality control process and about QC sampling and figuring out when something needs to go there and the various tests on the merchandise. In this blog, we will discuss over the inbound value added services area or the prep area.

Let us talk about some of the Prep Area Activities. This is bagging. It happens a lot at retailers. What you see here is the product has been shipped in to the Retail Warehouse on hangers, because it’s going to go to the stores. But to go to consumers, it’s got to be in bags.

And those bags need to have individual UPC labels attached to them so that the product can be scanned at a packing station before it’s put into a shipping cart.

So once the bags are labeled and ready to go, the product’s going to be put into a shipping carton. That shipping carton will need a brand new carton license plate. And once it has that, it can be put away and made available for sale. This is bagging.

Types of Prep | System expectations

Now that you understand a little bit better what happens at the prep area, let’s talk about what the system requirements are for that given area.

• There’s a bunch of different kinds of prep activity, and when a case gets to the prep area, the first thing the guy wants to know is what do I do with this stuff? So there needs to be some way to capture in the system, in receiving or on the item master or something, what it is that this product requires when it gets to the prep area.
• The second thing is several of these activities, like generating labels for units or cases or reboxing or taking apart a prepack or what we call a package in D365 F&O world. The Retailers are expecting the system to support those activities with mobile device menu items or at least screens to help guide the process. If I want to print out 50 unit labels for this given SKU, I want to be able to go to the screen and scan that SKU or type it in and say give me 50 labels and out they pop and so I can apply them to the product. So reboxing is similar. If you’ve got 50 in a carton, you want to split them out into ten cartons of five each, then you want something that will print the carton labels and allow you to do the inventory adjustment that gets rid of the carton of 50, et cetera.

So these are the expectations that retailers have in this area for recording what needs to be done to the carton and then assisting some of these tasks. But the vast majority of these activities will be done totally without the system’s knowledge. The system can’t help you remove a hanger from a shirt, but it can print out a label. So you just need to keep that in mind as you start inventorying the functionality that you need for the prep area. But there’s one other important thing to talk about related to prep, and that’s how it gets there and what the requirements are around that.

Diverting Product to Prep

So a functionality is required that allows product to get to prep in two ways. The first way involves what I would call a user diverting something to prep at their discretion.

For example, look at this beat-up box. At first glance, if you’re not working in a warehouse regularly, you might think, well, what’s the big deal? Just throw it on the shelf. But if you can see, the left-hand side of this box has been crushed down and sloping forward such that if you put a second box on top of it, and this box happens to be 25 feet in the air, that second box has the chance of slowly edging and sliding down and eventually falling out and striking somebody on the floor 25 feet below. Now, you might think the chances of that happening are slim. But there’s still that chance. And there’s no way the system would know that this particular box is damaged in this fashion and that it needs to be reboxed. So the receiving associate is trained such that when he sees a box like this, he decides to have this thing reboxed before he put it away. That is what I would call a user diverted prep carton. It only happens occasionally, but it’s got to be something that the receiving operator decides.

The other type is product that always needs to go to prep for whatever reason every time it comes in. Look at this box. This box is gigantic. I’m not exactly sure what’s in it, but I can assure you the product that’s in there can’t fit on the shelf in the storage rack that we’ve got. If you try to put it in there, it’s just too wide. It takes up almost two pick locations. So what you’ve got to do is to take it and open it up and rebox it into another box that actually will fit in the pick face. And this is going to happen every time this product shows up. So this is something that the system needs to be capable of diverting to prep automatically based on, say, a characteristic of that product or something that’s on the product master.

So the requirements here in prep are that there needs to be a way of sending things to prep at the user’s discretion, and there needs to be a way of always sending something to prep, set up in the system so that it always happens. I hope this blogs have provided you enough information about the prep location system expectations so you can talk about during any D365 for Commerce implementation utilizing Advance Warehouse management.

In our next blog, we are going to talk about what is unique about case putaway and is there something that is unique about how that needs to be done and configured within D365 F&O Warehouse management.

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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