In my earlier post, I mentioned some unique characteristics and challenges of running a service parts warehouse. Now comes the good part: Oracle WMS, especially the R12.1 release has a decent set of features that can be leveraged to handle these requirements. Specifically, I am talking about the following:
On the outbound side
- Cluster Pick
- Cartonization & Cluster Pick By Label
- Shipping Label Printing
- Pick Confirm using item bar code scan
- Bulk Picking
- Parcel Manifest Integration
On the Inbound side:
- Putaway By Item
- Leveraging equipment for putaway
Outbound:
Cluster Pick is the single most important feature for service parts. As a matter of fact, back in the days when I worked for Oracle, this was requested by an early adopter of WMS who happened to be in the service parts business. If “cluster pick” sounds unfamiliar to you, some WMS products, including EXE where I worked in my earlier life, refer to it as Batch Pick. The beauty of “cluster pick” or “batch pick” is that it lets you pick a bunch of orders at the same time within one sweep of the warehouse. In a service parts business, where a majority of orders are 1-3 lines, this is a life saver. When you choose cluster pick, WMS asks you the number of orders that you want to pick simultaneously. For example, in the auto-parts warehouse that I described earlier, the cluster size is 16 meaning up to 16 orders are picked simultaneously. WMS does a good job of interleaving the tasks for the 16 orders so that at the end of the picking line, all 16 orders are picked into their respective containers. In the process, it also optimizes the pick path, to ensure pickers are not walking back and forth.
Another useful feature for service parts is the cartonization feature. Cartonization further cuts down the material handling needed by allowing the pick operator to directly pick into a shippable containers in other words instead of pick and pack as two separate steps, you can pick and at the same time pack into its final shippable carton. If Cartonization is enabled, you get a shipping label for every order when the order is released. These labels can be handed off to pickers to initiate picking. Pickers scan the labels (“using pick by labels”) and get the pick tasks one by one for that label.
R12.1 further extends this idea by allowing pickers to scan multiple labels and interleave tasks for multiple orders. It even forces the operator to confirm each shipping container when the pick occurs, in order to ensure that the right part is going into the shipping carton for a particular customer. Since the picking is done directly into a shipping carton, there is no need for a packing operation at the end of the picking line. Basically , they have combined the idea of cluster picking and cartonization and called it Cluster Pick By Label. Aditya has an excellent blog post on this over at the Oracle WMS blog (http:// blogs.oracle.com/logistics) that I highly recommend
Bulk picking has around for a while and has been improved since the original release. In a nutshell, this allows you to combine multiple picks across several sales orders into one consolidated pick task. The picker is then directed to drop this off to multiple destination locators/lpns as the case may be. This saves a significant time at picking – instead of executing 10 different pick tasks for the same item, the picker is simple directed to execute one.
Finally, since parcel shipment is common for service parts, integration to 3rd party manifesting systems like Kewill, ConnectShip is needed. Oracle WMS has a standardized integration with ConnectShip using XML Gateway. The same integration framework can be used by other manifesting software systems.
Inbound:
On the inbound side, in a lot of cases, these items are also received, not in clean, easy to transact pallet and case quantities, but in loose and partial case quantities. The question with Oracle WMS is how do you put this away efficiently? Oracle WMS requires that everything be in a LPN in order to execute putaway rules. The LPN in these kinds of receiving scenarios is not really very useful as there is really no pallet or case they are putting away. In these case, one solution might be to use the equipment (such as a trolley ) as a LPN. Users can receive everything into this LPN, and then scan this LPN and put it away. At drop time, they can either drop into the sub using the drop lpn button (if the sub is non LPN controlled) or use the transfer contents button. Either way, at the end of the process, the LPN/equipment should be empty and ready for re-use
To take this a step further, this is a little know fact, but Oracle does actually allow you to putaway by line within an LPN. So, if you had an LPN that had multiple items on it, Oracle does actually allow you to scan the Item you want to putaway rather than depending on the system to direct you always. This is critical in this kind of loose item putaway scenario because you don’t want the user to have to hunt around for the items, but instead putaway the items that are on top first. Of course, this has to be balanced with the dropping order sequence that controls drop off path efficiency.
Together, all these features go a long way towards addressing the requirements of the Service Part industry.
That’s it for now. Apologies for the long blog but I had a lot to say about this, as I always do :-)
