This concept is particularly useful when there are locations/areas in the warehouse where it is more efficient to operate on complete top level
handling units instead of single reservations. This might be the case in bulk zones or locations that are hard to reach.
There are three different scenarios and the idea is that you would like to pick those in different ways, either in one step or in two steps:
The reservation logic can be set up to prioritize reservations of full top level handling units as per below. Handling units that get completely reserved by one demand can be picked straight from their respective location to the shipment. This can be achieved by running Create Consolidated Pick List for Customer Orders or Create Consolidated Pick List for Shipment. Select checkbox Only Handling Units to be Picked in One Step. This will filter out those handling units.
Two-step picking is a way of facilitating the picking of reservations that make out part of a handling unit or when a handling unit is reserved by multiple demands.
The picking is then devided into two steps. The first step is to move all reservations in a certain part of the warehouse to a location were it is
more efficient to pick, like a staging area/temporary location or the actual picking location. This is done by running either
of the batch programs,
Move Customer Order Reservations with Transport Task / Move Shipment Reservations with Transport Task.
Here the user can define from which locations to move, criterias on which reservations to move and
what location to move to.
To be able to run the outbound process for a batch of reservations, the selection criterias for reservations are the same as for
Create Customer Order Reservations and
Create Consolidated Pick List for Customer
Orders / Create Consolidated Pick List for Shipment
The move is made by creating one or more Transport Tasks.
The possibility to reserve from active transport tasks makes it even more
flexible. After executing the transport tasks you run the second step,
Create Consolidated Pick List for Customer Orders /
Create Consolidated Pick List for Shipment,
creating pick lists for the reservations.
A common setup in a warehouse operation is to have a bulk zone and a picking
area.
In the bulk area you only operate on top level handling units and in the picking area you pick parts of
handling units.
To achieve this in the system you want to set up two storage zones, the bulk and the picking area.
This is done in Storage Zone.
On the Site, Site - Inventory - Automatic Reservation,
set Reservation Priority 1 = Highest Putaway Zone Ranking, Priority 2 = Largest Quantity on Handling Unit and Priority 3 = Outermost Handling Unit.
This will make sure that the reservation will try to reserve as few handling units as possible and at the same time as full and close to the top level as possible.
To avoid locking up the inventory, also tick Reserve From Transport Task here.
Finally in Putaway Zone Basic Data
you set the reservation ranking to prioritize full handling units in bulk and less than a full handling unit in the picking area.
In Ranking, set a lower number (higher ranking) for the picking area and then vice
versa in Handling Unit Reservation. This will make the bulk zone rank higher
when looking for full handling units and the picking zone rank higher for
anything less than a handling unit.
This is not the same as Two Stage Picking.