Describe use cases for Warehouse Management Systems (WMS)
Every warehouse must have a layout that visually assists you in configuring the warehouse according to the physical layout of the business. In a warehouse, some equipment can help workers move products around the warehouse, such as forklifts and ladders.
Warehouse staff need to be able to put away items, pick items, and move them from one location of the warehouse to another.
A daily task for warehouse staff is to rearrange products to make space within a location for new item arrivals. Workers walk up and down aisles to pick or put away items for order.
Warehouse workers can use their time and maximize productivity during daily operations by having the correct data and visibility of the available space of locations.
To increase the efficiency of a warehouse and maximize its storage capacity, companies need to accurately record information regarding the whereabouts of products and where warehouse staff can pick from and put away the products more efficiently.
When warehouse management is configured and used throughout the product lifecycle, Supply Chain Management makes the work at the warehouse more efficient and manageable.
The Warehouse management system in Supply Chain Management gives you flexible ways to define your warehouse layout to meet changing needs, so you can optimize warehouse efficiency.
You can set up high-priority and low-priority storages areas for optimum placement of goods.
You can divide your warehouse into zones to accommodate various storage needs, such as temperature requirements, or various turnover rates for items.
You can specify warehouse locations on any level (for example, site, warehouse, aisle, rack, shelf, and bin position).
You can group locations by using physical capacity constraint settings.
You can control how items are stored and picked based on query-defined rules.
Using Supply Chain Management, you can set up a warehouse by using a warehouse configuration template. Several predefined configuration templates are available and can be useful in many scenarios. Examples include:
You have completed and tested a configuration setup in a test environment, and you now want to copy the setup to a production environment.
You want to roll the warehouse setup out to several legal entities or create a new warehouse in the same legal entity.
You want to quickly prepare for a demo of the warehouse functionality.
You want existing items and warehouses to use the functionality in warehouse management instead of the functionality in Inventory management.
Zone groups, zones, location types, and locations
As part of the process for enabling a warehouse layout, you must define warehouse zone groups, zones, location profiles, location types, and locations.
Zone groups – A logical or physical grouping of zones within a warehouse.
Zones – A logical or physical grouping of locations within a warehouse.
Location profiles – A logical or physical grouping of locations that have the same warehouse location process policies (for example, a mix of different item numbers can be stored there, and the same physical capacity constraints apply).
Location types – A logical or physical grouping of the warehouse locations. For example, you can create a location type for all staging locations. Mandatory settings on the Warehouse management parameters page drive the process of defining staging location types and the final shipping location type.
Locations – The lowest level of location information. Locations are used to track where the on-hand inventory is stored and picked in a warehouse.
The following screenshot depicts zones and zone groups.
The entities that you create to define your warehouse layout are used in the queries that you set up in work templates to drive work orders in the warehouse. Therefore, when you define the zones and location types, consider how different areas in the warehouse are used for different processes.
Additionally, consider factors such as the physical characteristics of a particular area. For example, there might be areas where you can use only a certain type of forklift truck. Or, if your company has both production and finished goods within the same facility, you might want to create a single warehouse in Supply Chain Management but then separate the two operations by creating two zone groups. Give your entities descriptive names, so it's easy to identify them when you use them in template queries.
Location stocking limits, location profiles, and fixed picking locations
You must consider the physical layout of the warehouse, to determine storage capacities (location stocking limits and location profiles) and as part of your attempts to achieve optimal warehouse processes.
Location stocking limits help ensure that work isn't created to request that inventory be put in a location that doesn't have the physical capacity to carry the inventory. For example, if some locations within a warehouse can hold only one pallet per location, location stocking limits can be enabled. The Quantity value can be set to 1, and the Unit value can be set to PL within a specific location profile grouping.
If more advanced calculations are required to control the location capacity constraints, the location profile settings can be used. In this case, the weight and volume are considered when capacity calculations are done.
To achieve optimal outbound processes, you should evaluate whether to use fixed picking locations and/or packing locations. Often, minimum/maximum replenishment is used for replenishment processes from a bulk area to the fixed picking locations, and multiple fixed picking locations can be enabled within the same warehouse and for product variants. Consider the flexibility that you can achieve by enabling dedicated demand replenishment overflow locations that are used only for wave/load replenishment processing.
Location setup wizard and warehouse processes
To quickly create the locations within a warehouse, you can use the Location setup wizard. As part of this process, you can easily maintain the format of the location names.
As part of the configuration of the warehouse, it's important that you enable warehouse processes according to business requirements. The most important components to configure are wave templates, work templates, work pools, and location directives.
Wave templates and work templates
Wave templates help enable the outbound "Release to Warehouse" process. When lines are released (either directly from source documents, via batch job processes, or via loads that have already been created), the wave template functionality is used.
You can create three types of wave templates:
Shipping
Production order
Kanban
Parameters are used to define how far the system should automatically go in the outbound work processing. A wave template is selected based on the wave template sequence and criteria that are specified in the template. If a template is listed at the top of the sequence, the criteria in that template are checked first. If the criteria can be met, the wave template is processed and the criteria in the next template is checked. Therefore, it's a good idea to put the template that has the most specific criteria at the top of the wave template sequence list, so it's processed first.
You must specify the wave process methods in each wave template. The methods that are available vary, depending on the wave template type.
Work template definitions play an important role in defining warehouse management work processes. They define what work is performed and how the work is done. Templates can also contain a directive code that links to a location directive to determine where work is performed. Work templates include a query that specifies the criteria for the work. Each template must include at least one Pick operation and one Put operation to drive the basic work operation of transferring on-hand inventory from one location to another.
If multiple workers must be able to process work for some of your warehouse operations, you might want to use the concept of staging for the inventory and separate the work execution into different work classes.
Location directives
On the Location directive page, you can define rules that can identify pick and put locations for inventory movement. For example, in a purchase receipt transaction, a location directive determines in which location the items will be put in the warehouse. Location directives consist of a header and associated lines. They're created for specific work order types. The following are the different work order types for which location directives can be created.
Purchase order
Sales order
Raw material picking
Finished good put away
Coproduct and by-product put away
Transfer issue
Transfer receipt
Inventory movement
Canceled work
Cycle counting
Replenishment
Return orders
Kanban put away
Kanban picking
Counting discrepancies accepted
Packed container picking
Location directives work with the aging dates that are recorded for locations to track when inventory first entered the warehouse. The Location directive inventory picking aging feature uses the date on the location to determine aging. The Warehouse location status feature updates the date on the location based on the date from the license plate.
You can use FIFO and LIFO strategies to ship both batch-tracked items and non-batch-tracked items based on the date when the inventory entered the warehouse. This capability can be especially useful for non-batch-tracked inventory where an expiration date isn't available to use for sorting.
When inventory is first received or created in the warehouse, the system updates the relevant license plate so the current date is displayed as the aging date. This date is then used to identify the oldest or newest inventory in the warehouse. If inventory is moved to a location that isn't tracked by license plate, the location itself is updated with aging information, and this information will then be used by the strategies.
Work pools
Work pools are used to organize work into groups. For example, you can create a work pool to classify work that occurs in a particular warehouse location. For all work types except counting, you can assign a work pool to a work template. For cycle counting, you can assign a work pool on the following pages:
Cycle count plans
Cycle count thresholds
Cycle count work by location
Cycle count work by item
When you use work templates to create work, the work pool is automatically assigned to the work.
Work pool IDs can also be used to limit the type of work that is directed to a particular warehouse worker, if this functionality is configured on the relevant mobile device menu item.
As the name suggests, location directives are used to direct the work transactions to the appropriate locations in the warehouse. In other words, they define where to pick and put.
To make it easier and quicker to define the actions that are associated with each location directive line, use one of the predefined strategies.
The following video displays the product receipt transactions in the warehouse. The product is received based on a purchase order using the warehouse mobile application. The product is transferred from the receiving location of the warehouse to some other location.
Similarly, for all other transactions involving warehouses, transaction templates can be created to perform the warehouse transactions using the mobile application.