Problem Statement: Picking inventory from the warehouse is complicated, unclear and time consuming when the license plate has more than one batch or SKU on it. When a license plate has multiple batches on it, the process required to pick the pallet to a wave is repetitive and prone to error.
Background setup: Our site produces a large number of cartons of inventory every day.
These cartons contain food each with unique weight. The cartons are serialised with an individualised GS1 number that is required by our compliance and legislation requirements. Each carton is also individually weighted, and this weight is on the carton label and used for sales pricing and required for export tracking.
Inventory model has the following enabled:
Batch Tracking
Serial Tracking
Catch Weight Tracking
License Plate Management
Advance Warehouse Management
Batch uniqueness is set for the item, date of packing, site produced from and some other internal separators from production runs. Inventory Reservation to a sales order is “Batch Above”, supporting a quantity of cartons being reserved per batch against a sales order.
Sales are predominately containers of approx. 20t of serialised cartons. This may be approximately 1000 cartons given an average carton weight of approx. 20kg (though there is significant variance on this average)
Warehouse stock complexity. While the inventory is generally palletised in a batch, there is approximately 20% of the pallets in the warehouse that are “multi-batch”. This occurs when a pallet has cartons (serials) of the same item code added to it from two or more production dates. The mixing of batches on a pallet occurs through topping up a part pallet from yesterday with todays product, or when part pallets remain from sale, so consolidation of cartons into single pallets occurs. As such the part / mixed pallets are always changing in the warehouse as the product moves.
Its these mixed pallets that the issue lies with.
Reservation and release. Batch Reservation is manual When the reservation is released to the warehouse and the wave processed, there comes an issue. Ideally, the entire license plate would be selected for picking to a work item, enabling the pickers to go into the -frozen warehouse and get an entire pallet, bring it out to the staging location and then load the sale. This works where the license plate is full pallet of a single SKU/batch.
Where there is a mixed pallet the release to warehouse does not understand the LP make up, but processes each batch reservation line against the sales order independently, generating multiple items of work. This can be minimised by sorting the releasing the work by location, so that a single work id targets the pallet for each batch quantity needed. This however still asks for multiple picks to be done from a single location for each batch quantity required. The desire is to have the whole pallet reserved and able to be picked to the SO in one step, rather than process each batch separately and potentially even needing to confirm every serial number as part of the scan pick.
Flexible Reservation A potential solution to support that showed promise is the Flexible Warehouse-Level Dimension Reservation Policy. This was explored to see if the License Plate could be directly reserved to the order, as this would help tremendously to support the requirements. Initial promise was seen, however this fell down due to catch weight not being supported for this approach. Customisation was also reviewed to see if this restriction on catch weight could be overcome, however it was determined the customisation would have far reaching implications for inventory processing and be in an area of code that should not be overridden.
Ask for support We are seeking any and all advice from prior solutions that would help us resolve this issue. How can a multi-batch license plate of catchweight, serialised and batch tracked inventory be effectively and efficiently added to a directed pick in an advance warehouse model so that the warehouse operator only have to visit the pallet once, regardless of the number of batches to pick?
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