Warehouse Management

In the not so recent post on case picking , we discussed the challenges that warehouse users face in implementing case picking. This is Part-2 of the original post that is almost a month late but then there are excuses like..the blog environment was upgraded from Manila to Movable Type.

I mentioned earlier that there are two ways cases can be modeled:

#1 Cases Stored as LPNs
#2 Cases Stored without LPNs

In the part-1 of this post, we evaluated under what circumstances, Cases should be stored as LPNs. In this post I will discuss the pros and cons of the scenario where cases are stored in the warehouse bin without a unique License Plate number assigned to it. Thus each case of material is not marked individually with a number such as license plate number or a serial number.

How else do you handle cases if not LPNs?

The answer is Unit of Measure (UOM). WMS allows you to define unit of measure for standard packing configurations for a single item such as a case. The obvious keyword here is "standard" which is to say that if you have non standard packing e.g. some of your cases have 9 EA and some others have 11 EA, this option is not for you. The other thing to pay attention to is "single item" which essentially means that this option works only if one case has one item. If you pack mixed items into cases and want to use UOM. Sorry! Go back to option 1 and store them as LPNs.

Now lets see how UOM behaves in different parts of the warehouse. First thing first, in order to store cases without LPN marking, you need to define your case storage as "Non-LPN" controlled. This way its still possible to manufacture, receive and putaway cases as LPN but not store them as LPNs in storage.

Receiving : If you receive cases and lots of it, you can directly receive them as cases by specifying the UOM corresponding to case and entering the case quantity received. You can also save your operators the hassle of multiplying the standard pack quantity with case quantity and then entering the received quantity in primary UOM. Its also a good idea to directly receive and load the cases into a pallet LPN for ease of putaway.

Putaway: Once the cases are loaded onto a pallet LPN, the entire pallet can be putaway using the normal WMS putaway functionality. The putaway operator will be suggested to drop individual cases into different locators depending upon capacity or other storage constraints. Its also possible for WMS to suggest a single locator to store the entire pallet.

Picks: You get maximum productivity benefits of storing cases without LPN during picking. Especially so if you are picking multiple cases of items. You can also configure the system to suggest pick tasks in Pick UOM or cases e.g. this way if one case contains 12 EA, a task to pick 8 Cases will not show up as 96 EA but in a more user friendly manner as 8 Cases.

What if you need case level UCC-128 labels?

You can cartonize the tasks such that a shipping label is generated at the time of order release. The drawback of this approach is that operator needs to pick one case at a time.