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Crossdocking from Manufacturing

In one of my previous posts, I blogged about facilitating "Just in Time" crossdocking from your assembly line directly to a shipping dock. The objective is to finish assembly completion into an LPN, move it directly to a staging area and then ship it. This process has obvious benefits such as:

  • Reduction in inventory, storage and thereby carrying costs

  • Minimal material handling and therefore reduction in labor and equipment costs

  • Reduction in lead time and therefore faster shipment

In order to make this process work, you need to tie the WIP job to a sales order using either the new planned crossdocking functionality in R12 or using ATO feature. Either way your WIP job will be reserved to the sales order. To further optimize the process, you need to minimize "contacts" for the shipping container and you might want to consider the following ideas:

  • Shipping Label at Manufacturing: To minimize material handling, you would want to create a shipping label directly at WIP completion for the license plates. The labels can be customer specific that include the customer name, address and purchase order number. By labeling the license plates at WIP completion, the shipping process can be simplified because no additional labeling steps may be required as part of the outbound flows. However the customer data is not available on any labels at WIP completion. You will need to use the "Custom Label Field" feature in R12 to fetch the shipping information e.g. a custom label field can be defined for  order number as follows. In this example the return value of the following SQL is mapped to custom label field defined for order number:

Select A.ORDER_NUMBER FROM OE_ORDER_HEADERS_ALL A, MTL_RESERVATIONS B, WMS_LABEL_REQUESTS WLR, OE_ORDER_LINES_ALL D
where WLR.ORGANIZATION_ID = B.ORGANIZATION_ID
and B.ORGANIZATION_ID = D.SHIP_FROM_ORG_ID
and D.HEADER_ID = A.HEADER_ID
and D.INVENTORY_ITEM_ID = B.INVENTORY_ITEM_ID
and B.DEMAND_SOURCE_LINE_ID = D.LINE_ID
and WLR.LPN_ID = B.LPN_ID
  • Conveyor for Staging Move: After assembly completion and labeling, you can have the operator drop the LPN on a conveyor with a fixed mount barcode reader and divertor that directs the LPN to the correct outbound dock based on the reservation and the dock schedule for the order. If you wish, you can also have an in-line weighing scale that verifies the actual weight of the container to its standard weight and diverts it to a manual inspection area based on a tolerance.

  • Automate Ship Confirm: If you wish you could also install a fixed mount bar code scanner to read the LPN barcode or have the LPN pass through an RFID portal to initiate ship confirm transaction for the LPN.

Update: The query mentioned above has been corrected. Thanks to Pawan Dwivedi for pointing out the error.

Comments (3)

Pawan S Dwivedi.:

The query given seems to be wrong as there is Organization_id in OE_ORDER_HEADERS_ALL table.

Kindly guide.

Thanks,

Pawan

Pawan S Dwivedi.:

Hello Aditya,

I believe the query should be like this:

SELECT A.ORDER_NUMBER

FROM OE_ORDER_HEADERS_ALL A, MTL_RESERVATIONS B, WMS_LABEL_REQUESTS C, OE_ORDER_LINES_ALL D

WHERE C.ORGANIZATION_ID = B.ORGANIZATION_ID

AND B.ORGANIZATION_ID = D.SHIP_FROM_ORG_ID

AND D.HEADER_ID = A.HEADER_ID

AND D.INVENTORY_ITEM_ID = B.INVENTORY_ITEM_ID

AND B.DEMAND_SOURCE_LINE_ID = D.LINE_ID

AND C.LPN_ID = B.LPN_ID

Kindly verify it and let me know if anything else is required.

Also, could you guide me (Or provide me) some learning material over WMS Module and any material of its implementation in US warehouses? Any such material/information will be of great help to me.

Dank du Sir.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen,

Pawan S. Dwivedi

Associate Consultant - ES

Infosys Technologies Limited,

Mob: 91-9866657981.

Tel: 91-40-2300 5222 x54158.

Aditya Agarkar:

Pawan

Thanks for pointing out the error. Really appreciate your effort. The only correction that I have made is the reference to WMS_LABEL_REQUESTS table. It needs to be referred as WLR.

SELECT A.ORDER_NUMBER FROM OE_ORDER_HEADERS_ALL A, MTL_RESERVATIONS B, WMS_LABEL_REQUESTS WLR, OE_ORDER_LINES_ALL D WHERE WLR.ORGANIZATION_ID = B.ORGANIZATION_ID AND B.ORGANIZATION_ID = D.SHIP_FROM_ORG_ID AND D.HEADER_ID = A.HEADER_ID AND D.INVENTORY_ITEM_ID = B.INVENTORY_ITEM_ID AND B.DEMAND_SOURCE_LINE_ID = D.LINE_ID AND WLR.LPN_ID = B.LPN_ID

The best place to learn about Oracle WMS is the implementation guide. I regularly blog about Oracle WMS and our product direction on this site. Please check back regularly for new posts. In the mean time if you have something new to share, let me know and I will add you to blog editors panel. Feel free to contribute.

Thanks

-Aditya

Thanks

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on April 25, 2007 2:15 PM.

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