Let me illustrate this shortcoming with an example e.g. if you have an order for a wire for 100 meters with a 10% over ship tolerance.  Assume you have bobbins in the warehouse with 105 meters, 110 meters and 150 meters of wires respectively. If you model the bobbins as LPNs and have full LPN allocation mode turned on, WMS will backorder the entire quantity even though two of the bobbins i.e. bobbins with 105 meters of wire and 110 meters of wire is within the tolerance.  If you do not have full LPN allocation mode, it will assume that you will cut 100 meters from one of the bobbins and allocate the rest to some other order.  This is even worse since it will unnecessarily force you to cut material when nothing like that is needed.

One of the customizations we did a long time ago for one our customers was to make sure that WMS looks at LPNs greater than the ordered quantity for allocation purposes. This works very well for the situations we illustrated earlier. In the above example, with this customization it’s possible to allocate more than the ordered quantity and create a task to pick the bobbin with 105 meters of wire.

The good news is that this feature is now available in the standard product. The feature dubbed “over allocation” in R12.1 works exactly like I outlined above. With over allocation mode, the task quantity can exceed the quantity ordered provided the overall allocated quantity is within the shipping tolerance. You can either specify the over ship tolerance within the rule or instruct the rules engine to use the over ship tolerance at order line level.  To take full advantage of this feature, you need to have full LPN allocation. The advantage of this feature is that the LPNs that contain more material than the ordered quantity, but within the over ship tolerance, are considered for allocation. There is no more issue of backorder and the need to cut products to get the desired size is minimized.

Please note however, this works only for Sales Orders at current time, not for orders from manufacturing where this is a common problem as well. We faced this issue while architecting the WMS solution at Zebra and have employed a different strategy to overcome this.

Rolled and continuous products have some unique characteristics that are particularly troublesome from a warehousing perspective. In this post I am going to talk about some industry needs the way I see them from my perch as a WMS implementer.

What are Rolled Product and Continuous Products?

You encounter these products every day. Think wires, cables, hot or cold rolled metal sheets, fabrics and paper rolls. Some of the unique challenges that one faces while dealing with these products are:

1. The items are planned, valued and priced based on weight or length. In other words, weight or volume unit of measure is most naturally suited for planning, manufacturing, valuing on-hand inventory and invoicing needs. However the items are physically stored as discreet units in the warehouse.
2. No standard packs. Due to the uniqueness about their production methods you are more than likely to get variable lengths of the product in your inventory. The variable nature poses problems as you cannot have a standard order size and as a result, the warehouses will result in smaller cut quantities of wires, rolls and sheets that need to be consumed somehow.
3. It’s difficult to fulfill an order exactly as ordered. Some of these items such as metal sheets or wires require effort to cut and therefore fulfilling an order exactly as ordered is difficult. Over or under picking of orders is the norm rather than exception for these products.

Over the years Gaea Global has implemented Oracle WMS at companies such as primary metal and utilities where we have comprehensively addressed these needs. The good news: most of the product functionality is available in the product and very few customizations are needed to address the major warehousing needs.

Let’s look at some of the WMS best practices from an implementation perspective:

1. Weight or Volume as the primary UOM: Since the items are planned, valued and priced based on weight or length, the primary UOM needs to be weight or volume.  The 11.5.10 catch weight functionality is not your friend as catch weight implies that you keep a discreet UOM as primary and capture quantity in a secondary UOM for invoicing needs only.
2. Define each discreet unit as LPN: This implies that every roll or bobbin is an LPN. This way you can store the quantity in LPNs without the need to measure or enter quantity every time a pick is performed.
3. Maintain accurate weight/volume for LPNs: This means from production to storage the LPN (i.e. roll, bobbin, bale, etc) must have accurate weight. This means that you do not need to weigh or measure the volume during pick time. If you happen to cut the product, the weight or volume of the product in the LPN must be updated.
4. Full LPN Allocation: Full LPN allocation ensures that residual quantities in LPNs get allocated and consumed. The out of the box allocation may not be most optimal and customizations may be needed to strike the right balance between quantity picked and quantity picked above tolerance.
5. Capture over ship tolerance: This needs to be captured at the time of order entry or defaulted for each item. Over ship tolerance ensures that item ship quantity is controlled.
6. Configure Pick with no over pick or under pick tolerance: Certainly you do not want to enter exceptions every time picks over or under. As I mentioned earlier, over or under picking of orders is the norm rather than exception for these products. You do want your operators to pick and confirm products without keying exception code every time.

What WMS does not do well is to recognize that over picking is common in the warehouse for such products. Therefore the tasks created will be consistently lower than the actual ordered quantity.

I recently watched a Webcast by Dan Gilmore about Labor Management. Dan essentially belabored the point (no pun intended): labor management is important for your warehouse. I will echo one of the points that Dan made in the webcast: labor management is much more effective in driving efficiency if you do predominantly piece picks.  It’s less effective in full case or pallet zones.  The reason is straight forward. Much of the labor savings in a warehouse is realized when you reduce the travel time and piece pick has a significantly more potential to cut travel time than case or pallet picks.

Not many are aware that Oracle WMS actually has a labor management feature. Obviously the usability of this product can be somewhat better but it does what it’s supposed to do Here are some tips to use WMS Labor Management system effectively:

1. Define Labor Standards: This is the basis of any labor management system and Oracle ‘s system is no different. If the labor standards in the warehouse do not reflect reality, the resulting report will be garbage too. If you don’t want to spend time and effort on getting labor standards using time and motion study, simply use historical averages. WMS lets you do that.
2. Keep it simple: Oracle labor management system allows you to define labor standards against multiple parameters e.g. you can define standard pick time and travel time to perform case picks in a refrigerated zone. My suggestion: keep it simple. Don’t attempt to define complicated labor standards e.g. standards for conveyable products in a floor zone for different pick equipment types. There are two reasons I am cautioning against overly complicated standards. One, the user interface is not designed for complicated setups. Second, you risk entering incorrect standard times for unusual pick configurations.
3. Focus on piece pick area: As mentioned before, you will get more efficiency gains from your each or piece picks. Therefore focus on entering more detailed and accurate information on piece pick zones.
4. Focus on picks: Forget putaways or replenishments. Most productivity gains will be accrued in your outbound picks. Focus on picks.
5. Don’t try to use it as a tactical tool: Labor Management in Oracle WMS works well if you are interested to know average picker productivity and especially the trend over time. It can also be used to benchmark your pickers against a standard. However it’s possible, it is not a good tool for daily or wave level load balancing or using it for day-to-day resource planning. Wave planning gives you greater flexibility to plan wave level labor and resource requirements. Unfortunately the two systems use different sets of data even though they relate to essentially the same thing.

Last thing I want to point out is that, you do not need to be restricted to just the out of the box reports available in labor management. The greatest advantage is that labor management stores the most granular labor and task execution information. The rich data can be very easily used to generate customized reports and analytics.

On the outbound side

1. Cluster Pick
2. Cartonization & Cluster Pick By Label
3. Shipping Label Printing
4. Pick Confirm using item bar code scan
5. Bulk Picking
6. Parcel Manifest Integration

On the Inbound side:

1. Putaway By Item
2. 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 3^rd 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 :-)

1. Large number of service parts: Obviously J. If you are one of those guys driving around a 1996 clunker for which you also happened to purchase an extended warranty, the auto manufacturer better have the service parts needed for your car. So the end result is that the service parts warehouse must stock a large number of parts. We are talking about 100,000+ parts here.
2. Low Demand: Most of these 100,000+ parts are “Slow Moving” parts. This one is obvious too. The demand for service parts declines a few years after the product matures.
3. Single Line orders: Service parts business get a lot of volume due to 1 or 2 part orders that are needed for one-off repairs. Due to the small order cube, the orders are mostly parcel shipments.
4. Prevalence of “hot” orders:  Service parts needs are often needed urgently and I have seen more than my fair share of “hot” orders flow through the warehouse on a given day. Sometimes these orders are overnight shipments because the manufacturer has a guaranteed SLA for servicing the part requirement.
5. Very High cost of shipping the wrong product:  Shipment accuracy is even more important for a service parts business. Further complicating the matter is that many of the parts look alike and often the part description is also very similar. Often there is a customer who is willing to pay for overnight shipment to get a service part on an urgent basis and getting a wrong part will not be appreciated.  Correcting such a mistake after the fact turns out to be very costly.

Stocking thousands of parts is no mean feat.  The service parts warehouse needs thousands of bin locations to store parts. The parts could vary from a few inches in length to a few feet in length. You need a large physical warehouse area to house these bins. A large area means a longer pick path. The challenge is to limit travel time to maximize operator productivity and at the same time ensure that a “hot order” gets shipped ASAP to minimize premium shipment service. Since accuracy is important, you need the operator to scan and maybe even rescan a part to ensure that the part you are shipping is the right one.  Clearly reliance on Auto-ID is important. Since parcel shipment is important in service parts fulfillment, integration with one of the parcel manifest software like Kewill, Connectship, Precision, etc. becomes important.

In my next post, I will review some of the features in Oracle WMS that addresses the unique needs of service parts fulfillment operations.

The problem arises when you have a lot controlled product primarily for traceability but do not really need lot control for shelf life control. In other words, you want the system to recommend lots to pick based on loose FIFO but not enforce them during picking. Unfortunately, Oracle WMS gives you an “all or nothing” solution. If you decide to make your products lot controlled, you have no option but to enforce lot allocation and only pick the lots that WMS tells you to. This is often a cause for grief and heart burn at many warehouses because this could drastically impact picking.

Imagine a scenario where each pallet is lot controlled and in a 2-deep warehouse slot. WMS directs the operator to pick a pallet that is currently sitting at the back of the rack. Obviously this will have implications for warehouse productivity since the operators will spend considerable time sorting through cases or pallets to pick the right lot. If the warehouse operators want to beat the system, this may also adversely affect the inventory accuracy and lot traceability i.e. the operators confirm the lots recommended by WMS but in reality, the operators physically pick the lot that is most convenient to pick. Either way this is a grave situation.

Here are some ideas and thoughts around this situation:

Do you really need lot control?

The essential point for having lot-control is traceability and shelf life control. If your product is not perishable or has a defined shelf life or if you do not require lot attributes or full traceability of products from manufacturing to shipment and don’t do product recalls, you do not need lot control.  Consuming products in FIFO mode because it’s a good business practice is not a good reason for Lot control. You can do a loose FIFO without having full lot control. You can use the receipt date and allocate down to the locator level using the rules engine without using lots.

Should you commingle lots?

Unless business reasons warrant it i.e. lack of shelf space, avoid lot commingling. If you have to commingle, at least commingle lots that have expiry dates within a tight cluster say within 30-days of each other. This way you can have a good trade-off between consuming products in FIFO mode, tighter space usage without the need to rummage through multiple cases or pallets to pick the right lot.

Is lot substitution the answer?

Maybe.  WMS allows lot substitution in 11.5.10. Oracle in its infinite wisdom has chosen not to release the patch for R12. Lot substitution allows an operator to pick a different lot than what the system is recommending. It seems like a good solution but unfortunately it does not solve the problem.  The reason is that the substituted lot must be freely available and not allocated for some other task. This is not a realistic assumption in a busy warehouse.

Is customization the answer?

What you really need is lot swapping -  i.e.  the ability to freely pick another lot regardless of its allocation status. Unfortunately you really need a customization to achieve it.  Extension rather – we don’t do customizations, we do extensions.  Like I said earlier, we have heard this from a few customers and are actually busy at work prototyping this and should be releasing this fairly soon. Stay tuned!

Oracle WMS: What is new in Release 12.1?

Aditya Agarkar, Director of Product Strategy

Aby Joy, IT Director, Igloo Products

This type of session has become a standard fixture for any Oracle Open World where Oracle WMS Product Strategy team lays out the new stuff in the product in the last one year. The first 10 minutes kind of covered Oracle’s WMS sojourn from 11.5.8 to 11.5.10 and that was also the opening for the case study on Igloo.

Few things to note about Igloo: it is a hosted WMS and OTM customer running 2 DCs on Oracle. My impression is that Igloo is pretty much using the plain vanilla WMS 11.5.10 release. The only major customization is to generate case labels in WMS prior to ship confirm. I presume they pick full or partial pallets and need individual labels for cases to address the compliance needs of Wal-Mart and other big retailers. We have done similar customizations before and I can tell you that warehouses that do a large volume of case shipments and require individual case markings, this customization is a life saver! This used to be a standard feature in EXE even back when I used to work there. I am happy to report that Oracle has a case labeling feature in 12.1 to address this need. I will post more in detail about this feature.

Another interesting point about Igloo is that they are using OTM along with WMS. I particularly liked Aby’s part in making the OTM work in WMS and skirt some of the integration pitfalls. It’s a great point: you implement the application you have to make it work and not what you could have or should have.

The other less reported but very important feature in Aditya’s WMS presentation was on pick methods especially support for widely used but previously unsupported pick methods such as Pick and Pass and Zone Picking. Both these are very useful techniques to drive pick efficiency. This is especially true if you have a large number of SKUs stored in split case pick zones. Very interesting and powerful features and I promise to blog about it some other day!

Life Fitness Gets Its Warehouse in Shape with MSCA

David Brossette, DSI

Mike Edwards, CIO of Life Fitness

I actually did not attend this session. However from what I hear, this is one of the rapid ROI projects for MSCA. It reinforces what I said earlier, the rapid ROI is tantalizing but reality is that a lot of things must be done right to get fantastic results like Life Fitness.

– Amin Sikander

Going Mobile in the Supply Chain

Jennifer Sherman, Sr. Director of Oracle WMS Strategy

Ken Norris, Director, Ottawa Hospitals

Jen Sherman and Ken Norris from Ottawa Hospital jointly led this session. Jen gave a very good recap of the various mobility platforms that Oracle has to offer. Just in case you are curious to know there are 3 of them. I will even summarize it for you here.

1. WMS and MSCA: A warehouse environment confines the WMS operators to a narrow area. Therefore WMS and MSCA work very well in an “always connected” mode telnet based mobile apps. Also comes in a GUI flavor with windows based mobile devices running JVM.
2. EAM: Connected and disconnected mode applications. I understand Oracle does not have a standard disconnected mode application for EAM and partners with 3^rd party vendors
3. Mobile Field Service: Since field service apps require field service personnel to be mobile and cover long range, these apps are traditionally disconnected. More recently they also run on browser based EDGE/3G networks.

Ottawa Hospital is different from your average MSCA implementation due to the fact that it’s a hospital store that supplies to various departments using replenishment carts. It was an information “rich” session with great tips and best practices from Ken about managing an MSCA and WMS project. Some that I made it to my notes are:

How to be a Supply Chain Hero: Quick Wins in the Supply Chain

Jennifer Sherman, Sr. Director of Oracle WMS Strategy

Carrie Lukatch, Director, Oracle Product Marketing

Kudos goes to Oracle product marketing for choosing the creative title for this presentation. The session was all about achieving rapid ROI on your IT investments. The session showcased three oracle products that are capable of delivering such heroic feats: Manufacturing Operations Center, Supply Chain BI and our very own MSCA. The “heroic feat” means a 13 weeks implementation and ROI within 4 months. That’s a heroic feat indeed by any standards. However the world of application implementations is replete with disappointed users, broken promises, chronic time and budget overruns. The rapid ROI is tantalizing. However the reality is that unless done correctly, there is considerable risk of falling short of these objectives. Now I am not implying that these ROIs are not realistic or cannot be achieved. Far from it! I will echo what Charles Philips said in his keynote: “the hard work begins at our customers after we ship the code”. In effect buying the software is the easy part but it requires a lot of blood, tear and sweat to make the software pay for itself. Now that is “heroic” in my book.

-Amin Sikander

I was at the Oracle Open World all week this year (we had a booth in the Primavera Pavilion). As always, Open World is a great place to meet with WMS customers, exchange war stories and interact with Oracle Product leadership teams. The attendance at Oracle Open World was surprisingly strong, in-spite of the malaise in the general economy.  Although overall attendance was indeed down, the people who did show up seemed to be more focused. If you missed Oracle Open World, here is a quick summary of some of the WMS and Mobility sessions that I managed to attend at Oracle Open World:

WMS Special Interest Group (SIG)

The SIG meeting is the morning ritual every Sunday before Oracle Open World. For a number of years I have woken up groggy eyed and made the early AM trek to San Francisco. The returns were always well worth it. Besides the knowledge sharing, its also a good time to chit-chat with old friends in the WMS world. Jennifer Sherman, Aditya Agarkar, Mark Lewis and Bill Reilly from Oracle, Joe Clay from DSI, Sid Ordog from Mod43, Debbie Arnold from DAZ they were all there. I heard that one of the ideas that OAUG is toying with is to reschedule SIGs to a weekday. This is certainly an idea with a lot of merit and it will go a long way to boost audience interest in WMS.

This year, the highlight of the WMS SIG was the customer case studies session. There were two case studies this year. Both the case studies were refreshing and presented for the first time in SIG. Raj Rege, Director of IT at Ikon presented their WMS implementation story along with Joe Clay from DSI. Raj walked through their WMS implementation and how it fits in their business context. The second case study presented by Sid Ordog and covered the MSCA project at TCI.  This was an implementation that I personally led. Once again, a very solid case study that demonstrates that a well planned and executed MSCA implementation can deliver a very solid ROI within a short span. Catherine Gauchat from TCI spoke on how their inventory accuracy was now at 100% and how much their productivity had increased. All this from a 6 week implementation, thus proving the point that you don’t need a long drawn out, complex implementation to derive significant benefits.

Transportation & Warehousing: Oracle’s Integrated Logistics Strategy

Derek Gittoes, VP of OTM Product Strategy

Jennifer Sherman, Sr. Director of Oracle WMS Strategy

Derek and Jen did a superb presentation outlining the overall vision of Oracle Logistics. Since R12 and especially in R12.1, Oracle has made significant strides in integrating Oracle Transportation Management and Warehouse Management. I must say that the overall vision of a global logistics platform that Jen and Derek presented is very compelling. I am optimistic that number of integration pain points (see my earlier post here) that exist in WMS and OTM would go away. The key points that I could glean from the presentation are:

1. Global Optimization: The point here is to optimize WMS and Transportation together. I have seen too often, companies treating them as two different functions. My take is that, this is because WMS and Transportation Planning software were traditionally developed by different vendors. This leads to localized efficiencies and missing out on larger benefits when the two functions are globally optimized. Oracle has a great vision here and I can’t wait to see it in action!
2. Synchronized Execution: The transportation plan remains a plan on paper if it is not executed. This means that transportation plan drives the carrier appointment, carrier appointment drives the wave planning, the wave planning drives the pick, pack and ship operation from the right dock door at the right time.
3. End to End Process: The message here is that the entire process: Order, Plan, Execute, Monitor and Settle can be supported on Oracle logistics platform. The process spans order management, WMS, OTM and Financials. Much of this end to end process is already supported and as Jen pointed out in her presentation, there are many more additional integration points in R12.1

More to follow. Stay tuned!

The integration point for shipping itinerary is absolutely critical as that drives the entire execution flow in WMS. Here are some things to watch out for:

How should you integrate with OTM?

The most logical method to integrate with OTM is to select the orders for release typically on scheduled ship dates or other selection filters, sending the order release information for the transportation planning, approving the plan and finally using the transportation plan for WMS for execution. This is the most common use case and the packaged EBS-OTM integration supports this. In EBS-Speak, this means you first create deliveries, send the deliveries to OTM, get the trip information from OTM and then perform pick release or wave planning in WMS followed by task execution in WMS.

Is this the only way? Well no. There are enterprises that plan warehouse activities before they plan transportation. This is not a common scenario and the enterprises who adopt this approach are usually the firms that outsource their entire transportation operations meaning an external firm manages the transportation of goods for a fixed charge. You will likely not need OTM in such a case.

What do Deliveries and Order Release mean?

One drawback of the packaged EBS-OTM integration is its reliance on deliveries. Nothing wrong with deliveries as such, but the packaged integration demands that no changes be made to deliveries during the integration process. This is a round-about way of saying that you cannot take advantage of OTM order release splitting.  What about EBS orders that exceed full trailer loads? There is a way out. EBS automatically splits those deliveries that exceed the maximum size of a trailer. Obviously this is not a perfect solution and may result in a sub-optimal transportation plan in certain situations.   However the good news is that there are several creative ways to get over this impediment that I will discuss in subsequent posts.

Handling Multi-Leg Shipments

One of the biggest benefits of OTM is its ability to consolidate less than truckload or parcel shipments directly to customers into a multi-modal shipment that maximizes full truckload shipments. These TL shipments could be routed through a deconsolidation pooling point.  What does it mean for EBS or WMS? Not much if you are using the standard EBS-OTM integration. This is because only the first shipment leg is received back into EBS. There is really no visibility to second or subsequent legs in EBS or WMS. This is not much of a problem especially if the deconsolidation point is a carrier hub or other transshipment point.

But what if it’s your own facility? This may post challenges:

1. Crossdock shipments: What if your consolidation or deconsolidation center crossdocks material from receiving directly into shipping? What if you want to achieve even more savings by scheduling receipts and shipments in OTM so that full truckload shipments are maximized?  How do you handle these receipts and shipments in WMS if you own this crossdock facility?
2. Merge in-transit: How do you schedule multiple receipts from different sources and combine them into a single shipment? How do you handle the receipts and storage of components in WMS as they await the build of outbound shipment?
3. Labeling and Shipping documents: How do you create labels and shipping documents at an intermediate point?
4. Accounting/ownership recognition: If the facility is your own you may run into challenges such as when do you account for change of ownership and recognize revenue?

Is the Transportation Plan feasible?

The typical integration flow means that transportation planning is carried out before wave planning or pick release in WMS. This could present some challenges such as insufficient labor or inventory exists for the planned items? A recommended practice is to ensure availability check or even enable reservations prior to sending the delivery information to OTM. Nonetheless sometimes you will end up with situations where the planned load from OTM may not have sufficient inventory or resources to fill. OTM does allow rerating of these deliveries when that happens.

This to me is one of the most significant problems with the typical integration flow. Most Oracle customers are already familiar with the hassle of dealing with deliveries and trips in a back order situation (btw, can we start a petition to have Oracle simplify that process? J ). Now, add to that the fact these trips and deliveries have already been planned in OTM and it just adds to the problems.

OTM Container Configuration and WMS Cartonization

OTM has a very useful feature called for container optimization that shows pallet loading configuration in a trailer. WMS has a useful feature called cartonization. Unfortunately how the cartons can be loaded onto the pallet to achieve optimized container load is not available. WMS and OTM handshake remains a pipe dream in this area. Hopefully Oracle will fix this soon.

Master Data and UOM

EBS and WMS give you limitless ability to define Units of measure. Alas no such thing on the OTM side! OTM has “hardcoded” UOMs. Tough luck if you have defined UOMs such as CS4, CD8, etc. in WMS to manage your package UOMs.  This is no big deal really just that you may have to map EBS UOMs to OTM UOMs and take care of this translation in BPEL.

Load Sequencing and Staging

Ok, you now have your deliveries/trips planed to your liking and are ready to release your pick wave. How do you ensure that the material is staged appropriately? – i.e. the material that gets loaded first (dropped off last) is staged closest to the dock door and so forth? You could use the Outbound Consolidation Plan for that purpose, but you will find that it does not really serve to address all your needs. This plan can be set to Locator or LPN level, but it just consolidates based on deliveries and hence does not give you the control you need – whichever delivery gets picked first will be staged first. You can do some tweaking, but not much and not enough.

Now look, my point here is not just to highlight problems, as I don’t see any of these as insurmountable difficulties frankly. We have seen and come up with solutions for most of these problems for various clients. For example, for the staging problem, we came up with a simple concurrent program that runs post pick release and assigns appropriate staging lanes. However, I do want you to consider these issues while planning your OTM-WMS implementation and make sure that these needs are analyzed and accounted for in your project.

So what does it mean? You are better off doing a gap analysis of the integration itself just like you do the other features during the design phase of OTM-WMS implementation. Depending upon the needs, there may be additional work involved to make the two products work better for your operations.

-Amin Sikander