A real time approach to picking, cross-dock, put away, shipping, and stock taking operations in your warehouse
A typical warehouse has to carry tens of thou-sands of SKUs, from different manufacturers, sourced through different suppliers, with different lead times, demand, seasonality, price, value, and customer demographic . Despite the complexity of the SKU’s, the conventional wisdom of organizing a warehouse is done alphabetically, by drug names (taking the pharma vertical as an example) which results in products being stored at the warehouse in a static, often ad-hoc manner without priority being given to product value, sales velocity, expiry or business need – worse still, products often get ‘placed’ in the wrong location if the initial (correct) location is full. This process today results in a high error rate in fulfilling store orders which in turn results in high costs being incurred due to mis-ships, incorrect inventory being carried at the store and creating problems while sending expired or recalled products back to the suppliers.
Solution
The S3 RTVS™ based solution for Warehouse Visibility redefines the way warehouses are organized, and operated. This system enables warehouse managers to optimize the placement and flow of products to maximize throughput, minimize the quantity of inventory carried in stock, and improve the accuracy of information throughout the supply chain.
Staying with the pharma area as an example of an emblematic solution in this area, the heart of the system is a unique 3-way numbering scheme that combines a passive UHF Gen2 RFID tag with a barcode and a human readable number. These tags are affixed on “totes”, which are plastic containers for individual drug units and sleeves. The totes are organized in an RFID-enabled shelving system that brings together physical locations with the totes. The RTVS™ solution enables indoor location of totes using passive UHF tags, the system is cost-efficient for a warehouse application, compared to any other location technology on the market. Complimenting the flexible warehouse organization are services for tracking the locations of collections of items within the warehouse on a continuous basis.
The schematic below outlines a simple process flow once a set of warehouse operations have been enabled with real-time operation visibility:
Benefits
- A multi-fold increase in accuracy of warehouse operations due to process level visibility provided
- Organization of totes by business needs, not by alphabets with additional put-away criteria based on business value, sales velocity, and expiry of product
- Reduced data entry and fewer operational errors during Receive, Putaway, Pick / Pack, and Ship
- Optimized order fulfillment to stores and reduction in overall store inventory
