Last week I blogged about picking strategies in the warehouse. The choice picking strategy is dependent on many things such as attributes of picking zone, items, orders and picking wave. Depending upon your objectives the choice of picking strategy could be different.
In order to analyze the Pick Stratgies in the warehouse, I have created this Excel Spreadsheet. The excel sheet requires item, warehouse layout, demand and task information. Subsequently it calculates overall load on warehouse and load per resource. Using this information warehouse planner can analyse the interplay of various picking parameters on picking efficiency. The spread sheet helps you evaluate pick strategies in your warehouse and provides a "what-if" type of analysis based on the choice of pick strategy such as:
What is the total time required for a specific type of strategy in the warehouse
What is the load profile on different resources in the warehouse
The objective of this tool is not to perform accurate calculations for
pick load and execution time. It is a rough-cut tool to analyze picking
stratgies and to faciliatate picks strategy selection and load
balancing with minimum data input. Data input requirements are
minimized by grouping items into item categories, locators into zones
and orders into order types. The assumption is that objects in a group
are similar and therefore pick information can be entered at the group
level. However like most other analysis tools, the output from this
tool would depend on the quality of the input. Therefore user must make
appropriate trade-off between accuracy of results vs. the time and
effort required to gather accurate data.
By no means do I claim this to be a "perfect" or "tested" tool. Please exercise caution while making any conclusions. Let me know if you find it useful or find something that is obviously wrong.
Comments (2)
I was wondering if you could give me any insight on a user problem I have been asked about.
Essentially we are currently using the "Order Picking" pick methodology with Oracle Apps 11i and it is a WMS enabled org. The warehouse manager has decided that he would like to change the picking methodologies based on the size of the order itself (i.e. based on all items in the order, not individual order lines). Essentially he would like orders that are less then a box (even though multiple items) to be picked by "Order Picking", orders that are less then a pallet (all items on the order being reviewed) to be "Picked by Label", and orders which are greater then a pallet (considering all order lines) to be done using "Bulk Picking". I do not see how this is possible on Oracle as all of the picking rules and so forth are based on looking at individual lines. I thought maybe by subinventory, but their subinventories are not broken down by BULK, CASE, EA it's more like Flow Racks (contains cases and pieces) and Racks (containing pallets).
How would you handle something like this with Oracle?
Posted by Arnow | May 9, 2007 4:10 PM
Posted on May 9, 2007 16:10
Hi,
I was wondering if somebody would let me know that , is it possible to pick orders on certain days.
For Ex customer A wants to pick the orders only on monday, so that shipping can be done 2 days after that which is Wednesday.
Similarly,
customer B wants to pick the orders only on Tuesday, so that shipping can be done 2 days after that which is Friday.
Is this possible through set up? or a pick release program customization is necessary?This is for a WMS enabled org.
Thanks and Regards,
Pinakin
Posted by Pinakin | October 3, 2008 4:54 AM
Posted on October 3, 2008 04:54