Managing Packing Material Inventory in WMS
There are two approaches to manage packing material inventory in Assure, as described below.
Approach 1 : Considering each roll / bundle as an item (Recommended)
Assure will consider one roll / bundle of packing material as one item. So the complete item’s lifecycle in Assure will be as a roll / bundle level. Simply put, one roll / bundle gets inwarded in Assure as one Item and gets outward as one item
Article Masters
Style ID will be defined at packing material roll / bundle level on the basis of below attributes:
Packing material Marketplace
Packing material type (polybag, Carton, green packing, etc)
Packing material dimensions
Any other unique attribute
SKU will be defined for each Style ID based on the count of packing material in the roll / bundle. Example – roll of 50 polybags for a particular Style ID will have one SKU ID and the roll of 100 for polybags for the same Style ID will have different SKU ID.
Inwards
Steps are
Inward order
GRN with QC. Note:
you need a scannable SKU barcode on each roll / bundle which identifies the roll / bundle as a separate SKU
Item ID will be assigned to each roll and not on each polybag.
Putaway
Outwards
Steps are
B2B Outward order
Inventory allocation
Picklist release
Picking
Packing
Handover
You will have to come up with frequency and size of outward orders of packing material so that this activity does not impact B2C forward order SLAs and other warehouse operations.
This roll / bundle cannot be split into individual poly bags unless the whole roll / bundle gets outward completely in Assure
Other Considerations
Article Master for packing Material SKU will need to be uploaded manually in Assure till the time D365 integration is not live. Once integration is live, this data will come from D365.
Inward PO and B2B Outward Orders will need to be uploaded manually in Assure till the time D365 integration is not live. Once Integration is live, these orders will come from D365.
Approach 2 (Not Recommended): Considering each packing material unit as an item
Article Masters
SKU will be defined for packing material on the basis of below attributes:
Packing material Marketplace
Packing material type (polybag, Carton, green packing, etc)
Packing material dimensions
Any other unique attribute
Inwards
For this activity GRN users will have to first open the packing material roll / bundle so that each unit of polybag is available separately for inwarding.
Users will need to inward each unit (each polybag) as an item and will have to paste Item ID stickers on it and have to do QC of each unit (each polybag) and map them individually to QC Pass / QC Fail bins.
You need a scannable SKU barcode either on each polybag or atleast on the roll / bundle which identifies the roll / bundle as a set of separate SKU
Outwards
You will have to come up with frequency and size of outward orders of packing material so that this activity does not impact B2C forward order SLAs and other warehouse operations.
Outward order will consider each polybag as a unit, hence, the quantity per SKU in order will be for the actual number of units.
Picking – Picker will have to pick each polybag from the live bins by scanning Item ID on each polybag to map item to the order. QC will also be done for individual polybags.
Packing – Packer will need to scan each polybag to map with the outbound Box ID. QC will also be done for individual polybags.
Why not recommended
Above steps will have a major impact on overall operational productivity, because each polybag needs to be bar-coded, picked, packed etc
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