Moving items around the warehouse before it gets to the order
So... this system works for dry-hire very well. meaning we are taking items from the shelf to the door. and then you have to have some other system at the door to find the different orders to go out.
I work for a moderate level production company. Gear usually leaves the shelves gets containerized and then goes to a prep area. From there usually we find out all the issues. wrong gear, to many were requested, not enough. The problem here is if we pull it and scan it to the order in pull sheet it adds it on the manifest. Which causes a problem if you return stuff back info the warehouse it stays on the manifest just changes it to recovery. The reason this is an issue is we can't send a manifest with gear on it that's at the warehouse for Tours going to Canada at some part of the tour. So the alternative is to go to scan related item and remove it from the prep. it takes forever because not only do you need to change the manifest you need to change the pull sheet.
What I suggest:
1- an additional flow item in the flow chart prior pull prep that doesn't add to a manifest. allowing for gear swapping back and forth with the warehouse. then ether a rescan or a copy and paste into outbound and that is were the manifest is created.
2- More of a logistics thing. For cable. gear and racks they usually go to a container a lot of the departments pre pull things for preps and put them somewhere in their department. or just somewhere in the warehouse. that's a temp thing. example: Right now we are using one container and just dropping it off in a prep space. but there's no record its in the prep area. so there's always the conversation "do you remember last week on Tuesday pulling this and where is it now?" I wish there was an easy changeable menu that's not menus deep that says a container is located at what prep space or doc space. or wherever in the warehouse. it could just be as simple as a note page attached to content builder.
3-for things that are waiting for outbound on the pull sheet having the same logistics note saying where it is.
-
Hi Nick Laing,
I think what you're looking for is the rarely-used Inventory Settings > "Journal Out On Prep" set to No. And possibly further config in Projects > Element Definitions > Pull Sheet > Shipping & Receiving and remove the configured Prep Manifest.
The first setting prevents Prep scans from marking the units/quantities as being out. It sounds like your "prep" process doesn't actually expect gear to be removed from availability, so this should fix that.
The second setting prevents Prep Scans from creating Manifests and Manifest lines. Again, if you're not expecting these behaviors, you can turn them off.
Next, if you don't have it already, you'd want to configure the Ship section of the Shipping & Receiving tab. I'm not completely clear on what you're expectations are here, but you can reach out to our support team with details and they should be able to help you configure your system to more closely match your expectations. My immediate advice is to transfer all of the config from the Prep section down to the Ship section and see how that goes.
As for your second and third points, I'm not sure we have a solution to that. Having worked in a few warehouses myself, that sounds very difficult to deal with. And, if I'm being brutally honest, it sounds like a bad practice. If I grabbed a rack or container for a specific job, I'd leave it in the area where the other gear was for that job, not randomly somewhere in the warehouse. That being said, if I combine that concept with the above changes, when I grab such a rack/container, regardless of where I leave it, the best practice would be to prep scan that container to the job (but now that it's not being marked out or added to a manifest, it's just got a scan record showing, essentially, who touched it last and why). Once I've got it all set and I'm about to put it on the truck, it would get a Ship scan, thus putting on the Manifest and marking it out of availability.
I hope that gets you somewhere in the right direction. Flex is incredibly flexible; you just have to find the right combination of settings that works for your flow.
Again, if you need further assistance, reach out to our support team with details and they should be able to get you fully setup.
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
1 comment