Planning your locations
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- Your business may have a number of sites. Each site represents a physically separate warehouse.
- Within each warehouse is a number of zones:
- Zones may be areas such as fast pick, mezzanine level, bulk storage, heavy stock for picking last, retail, technician trucks, back order receipts, showroom and quarantine stock awaiting credit.
- Your site/s might best be handled as a single zone in each site. But considering zones is critical. There is probably some stock that could benefit by being logged into a zone
- Picking slips are picked in alphabetical order by zone. If for example you have some pallets of paper to put directly into deliveries without being picked separately, put them in zone "ZZZ".
Warning Zones only effect the order in which stock is picked. Zones do not effect stock allocation.
- Retail businesses need larger locations:
- You need to still location your stock in a retail business
- Product location labels containing a barcode for the location and the product should be affixed to the appropriate fixture. So you can stocktake and put away stock even if there is none on the shelf
- Price changes can automatically generate shelf labels
- Stocktake by location can be used to setup, adjust and move stock between locations
- Locations define the fixtures in your business into which stock may be placed. You can get away with using bays some two meters wide if you are a retail outlet. For warehouses you want to go right down to the shelf level to get as efficient a picking process as possible.
- Locations are picked in alphabetical order. So the location coding system you use needs a lot of thought as it is critical to the picking process. If you use numbers make sure you put "0" characters at the start so they all sort the same. Or you use four numbers, the first number is "0004" not "4".
- In summary the procedure for naming your location codes is:
* Determine the longest location code you are going to have
* Determine the longest numeric element you may have in your location code
* Setup all your location codes so any numbers inside the location codes are always padded with zeros. So the number is on the right.
* Sort the location list by code and check they sort as you would expect.
Example
Locations start with two letters
The two letters may be followed by a number up to 1000 long.
The location code has to be
[XX][000N]
Where
XX is two letters. You can't have just "A", if you have letters you have to always have the same number of letters in the same place
000N is the number, eg. 0001,0100,0900,2100. The number is always the same length - Fixing your locations
If your locations do not always have numbers/letters in the same position and of the same length. Just go to locations and fix the codes until they do.
- Locations are picked in alphabetical order. So the location coding system you use needs a lot of thought as it is critical to the picking process. If you use numbers make sure you put "0" characters at the start so they all sort the same. Or you use four numbers, the first number is "0004" not "4".
- Product locations are automatic. This is the list of products currently stored in any location. The system tracks those details automatically. They don't need any setup unless you wish to set min/max levels for stock replenishment for products such as those in trucks or in fast pick areas.
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