Warehouse Management

Oracle E-Business Suite R12 release has been anounced. Look here for more details on the release announcement. If you are a new or an existing customer, you can obtain R12 from Oracle Store or download it from  Oracle Electronic Product Delivery site.

Many of you are curious to know more about R12. The Oracle
E-Business Suite Online Documentation Library Release 12 can be downloaded from here. Please look at Metalink note 394692.1 for helpful links to plan your R12 installation or upgrade.

For Logistics, R12 is a major milestone with hundreds of new features spanning Inventory, Shipping, WMS, MSCA and transportation. Check out the R12 RCD for a complete list of new features in Logistics area.

Some of the main features in this release for those interested in Logistics are as follows. Those who attended Oracle Open World in San Francisco, may recall demo of some of these features.

Inventory:

• Convergence with OPM
• Dual Unit of Measure Control
• Material status control
• Advanced Lot Control
  

• Flexible Document Support
• Workflow enabled shipping transactions

• Oracle Process Manufacturing Support (With R12 WMS can be used by OPM customers as well)
  
• Control Board Enhancements
• Planned Crossdocking
• Labor Management

• Oracle Process Manufacturing Support
• Oracle EAM support

• Multi-Delivery Consolidation
• Third-Party Warehousing Enhancements

In my previous posting on inventory accuracy in the warehouse, I referred to locator check digit feature in R12. In this blog entry I want to provide more details about this small but powerful feature to improve inventory accuracy in the warehouse. The biggest benefit of locator check digit is that it ensures that warehouse operator physically travels to the locator and performs transaction. Consider this example:

Sounds familiar? How does check digits help? The way check digits work is that each locator is associated with a check digit and transactions can be confirmed only using check digit. This check digit is printed on the locator label physically but it is not suggested to the operator on the mobile device. Meaning that operator can use the locator suggested on the mobile device to travel to the locator but must go to the locator to record its check digit. Besides check digits also helps in faster data entry especially if you have to enter long locator values manually.

Here is a small utility that I have developed in Excel that could be useful for initial locator or warehouse bin definition in your warehouse. To summarize the Excel file does the following:

1. Auto generates locators using range for 3 segments such as Row, Rack and Bin or X, Y and Z coordinates.

2. Generate check digits for each locator using algorithms such as Modulo-10, Alphanumeric, or Unique 4 digit check digit

3. Create locator labels with check digit. You need to have an XML enabled printer such as Zebra 110XiIII, Intermec PM4i, Sato CL412e, Toshiba B-SX6T, Cognitive Advantage LX, Datamax I-4308 or Printronix T5206. Alternatively you need an XML enabled print server such as Loftware, Niceware, Optio or Unibar.

The excel sheet can run a macro to generate the label XML. If you wish to randomize the check digits, there is a macro for it as well.

The locator generation parameters includes a range for each segment. Each segment in turn is split into two sections and you could provide a range for each section using the "From" and "To" parameter. You could for example create locators from EA1-A1-A11 to EA2-D3-Z14 by entering the "From" and "To" parameters as follows:

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: