The warehouse: zones, waves, packing and cycle counts

With advanced inventory on, the Warehouse section runs a warehouse the way one runs: stock is received into bins, orders are gathered into waves and picked by zone or by batch, packed into cartons at a station with each unit scanned, labeled through the shipping app, and a few bins are counted every day. Everything moves through the one stock ledger, as the basic screens do.

Zones

A zone is an area of a place with a job: the receiving dock, storage, pallet storage, the pick face, packing, staging or returns.

1. Open the Zone module in the Warehouse section, and pick the place.
2. Add a zone with its name and what it is for. Bins at the place already carrying that word join it; renaming the zone renames the word on its bins.
3. Put bins in it by scanning or typing their codes.

Stock is put away into storage, pallet, pick face and returns zones only, never the dock, packing or staging. The Bins view here is the same bins setup as under Setup.

Putaway rules and FEFO

Open the Zone module, Putaway rules, pick the place, and set where an item goes: a zone, or one bin. Under Purchasing, Receive, Put away, each tag is suggested a bin in this order: the item's pick bin while it has room; its rule's bin; a bin in its rule's zone, the one holding the most of the item, else the first empty one; the bin holding the most of it anywhere at the place; the first empty bin. Stock that expires sooner than anything in the pick bin is sent to the pick bin so it is picked first (first expired, first out). The list prints for the floor.

A row received against a purchase order can go straight into a bin: scan the bin's label into the Bin box on the row and it lands there, put away as it is received.

Waves

A wave gathers the orders still to send at a place and releases them into pick tickets at once.

1. Open the Wave module, and Gather a wave: the place, the carrier or service and its cutoff, and the orders. Take every order that asked to go one way with one tap, or pick them one by one. The store's, wholesale, marketplace and your fulfillment clients' orders are all here.
2. Say how it is cut: one ticket a zone (each picker walks their own zone; stock in no bin and anything short go on the first ticket), or one ticket for every so many orders.
3. Release it into pick tickets. Each is an ordinary pick ticket: given out, scanned, finished picked or short. The wave is being picked once one of its tickets is, picked once every ticket is done, and closed by hand.

While a wave is a draft it says which pick bins at the place have run low, so they are refilled first under Replenish. An order is in one open wave at a time, and an order already picked waits at packing rather than in another wave.

Packing

1. Open the Pack module: every order still to send, the picked ones first, and name your pack station if you have one.
2. Open an order and Open a carton in one of your boxes (set under Shipping, Settings, Carriers and boxes).
3. Scan each unit into it. A scanner's keystrokes end with Enter; the screen says what is in the carton and what is left. A code that is not on the order is refused ("Nothing on this order goes by …. Put it back."), and so is one more than the order holds. Some can be put in by hand.
4. Close the carton with what it weighs, packed. Open another for the rest.
5. When everything is in a closed carton, Everything is in: packed. The order is packed on the shipments desk, and order.packed tells anything that listens.
6. Buy the label, one parcel a carton: the rates from your carrier accounts, the label bought through the shipping app, and each carton then names its package and tracking number. Hand the cartons to the carrier from Shipping, End of day.

Every carton has the business's running serial. With your GS1 company prefix entered under Zone, Pack stations, each carton also has an 18-digit SSCC, printed as a GS1-128 barcode on a 4 by 6 label from the bench, for retailers that ask for one. The packing slip prints from the same screen.

Replenish

The Replenish module lists the pick bins that have run to their refill level, each with what fills it from storage, the soonest to expire first. Moved it moves the stock. Set an item's pick bin and its levels on the bin under Zones & bins, Bins.

Cycle counts

A warehouse counts a few bins every day instead of closing to count everything.

1. Cycle Count, ABC classes: every item classed by the value that moved through it in the last 90 days, A the few that are 80% of it, B the next 15%, C the rest. The clock classes them nightly; set a class by hand to keep it.
2. Schedules: add one at a place, saying which bins (the bins holding one class's items, one zone's bins, or whichever were counted longest ago), how many a run, every so many days, and whether it is blind. When its day comes the clock opens a count of those bins under Stock, Counts; Count now opens it at once.
3. Count and post it as any count of bins. What a count changed shows each bin and item with what was expected, what was counted, the difference and what it is worth, read from the ledger.

Fulfillment clients: packing, project work and pallets

On a fulfillment client's Billing, beside its rate card: a fee for packing materials by box (or any box), charged each time a carton of its order is closed and taken back if the carton is opened again or voided; project work by the hour, named (kitting, relabeling), charged with the hours worked; and storage by the pallet, counted once a day for the bins in pallet zones its goods fill (a day missed is counted the next day, as a bin's is). Invoice it monthly has the clock write the month gone by's invoice when it first comes round each month, on account, as if written by hand; the client sees it in its portal.

An outside 3PL's report and bill

On a 3PL's sheet in the 3PL module:

• Read their stock report: a CSV with a column for the item (their SKU, which is your part number, a barcode or a code on the part) and one for the quantity. It becomes a count of theirs beside yours, with the rows that match none of your items listed, to post or close as any 3PL's count is.
• What they charge: their rate card, each kind with the code it carries on their bill.
• Keep a bill: their bill as a CSV for a period. Each line is matched to the rate card by its code, else by its words, and to what your records say happened there: transfers received, units received, unit-days held, shipments out, units shipped. A line that agrees is matched, one that does not differs, and one no rate names is unmatched. Close the bill once it is looked over; its figures stay for the cost to serve.

Best practices

• Name zones for what they are, not where: Pick face, Bulk, Pallets. Make a zone before its bins so the bins join it as they are made.
• Give the items you pick most a pick bin with a refill level that covers a day, and let Replenish fill it from storage each morning.
• Gather one wave a carrier cutoff. Release it with enough time to pick and pack before the pickup.
• Scan every unit at the bench. A wrong scan refused at the station is a wrong parcel that never left.
• Count A items weekly, B monthly, C quarterly, blind, a few bins a day; post the count the same day so the ledger is never far from the shelves.
• Keep a 3PL's bill the day it comes, while the period's activity is fresh, and take up each differing line with them before paying.