The Best Practices to Optimize Slotting Process in Your Warehouse

This next best practice is about optimizing your slotting process. It’s all about picking and especially it’s even more important in the e-commerce world, because you are picking one unit order and two unit orders. This is what the standard order profile is for the orders that people are placing from their computers at home through the web and through the mobile device. It’s all about picking from the active locations and piece pick locations. It’s important to make sure that your active bin locations and SKUs that are slotted in those bin locations are done optimally. With slotting tool you can assign your A locations, with respect to proximity to a packing station or your outbound shipping area. 

It means choosing a location closest to the location where cartons are packed up and shipped. From this perspective you can classify your A locations, B locations, and C locations using your slotting tool. Then you can run a logic on your SKUs to find the SKU velocity, which means you take all the sales volume and then let’s say SKU A – 1000 units, SKU B – 800 units, and SKU C – 600 Units. After which you can sort you them in a descending order lookout for the new SKU order range. You already have your A locations, B locations, and C locations based on the proximity to the outbound shipping area and then you have your A SKUs, B SKUs, and C SKUs. You can now match them, which involves matching A SKUs in their A location, B SKUs in B location and C SKUs in the C location. 

warehouse-slotting-best-practices

If the match is not good then you can re-run your slotting and then move your slotting along-with your SKUs. The beauty of this best practice is if you have a slotting tool that’s integrated with your WMS with which you can use the slotting tool to automatically re-slot your tasks and push that to the WMS. Now the operators will automatically pick up those tasks and you can have at least one dedicated person, I mean you probably already have operators that are doing dedicated replenishments, operators that are doing dedicated cycle counts, like that for re-slotting you could have an operator. This operator can do the re-slotting on a periodical basis on a monthly or quarterly basis. This is something you want to figure out based on the dynamics of the whole slotting operation. You should make sure that the A SKUs are in the A location then B SKUs are in the B location and the C SKUs are in the C location. It’s all dynamically determined, which means every day the velocity is recalculated based on the volume and based on that your slotting is also determined. Based on this data you should start Re-slotting and then make sure that all these re-slotting tasks get pushed to the WMS. 

Have someone move the product that’s sitting from a location named 1 to let’s say location – 10. Due to analysis the SKU which is used to be A SKU is not A SKU anymore for some reason it’s not popular it now became a B SKU, so that means you don’t want to slot it in A location anymore. You should move it to B location and when you do you are creating room for some other A SKU that will be fast moving. So again it’s all about the management and that’s why it’s called the Warehouse management system. It is best to monitor and figure out on which time period you should execute your re-slotting process to make a value added process, it can be weekly or monthly. You should not move the products for no reason without monitoring the current situation. So hopefully this is helpful and please let us know your thoughts and comments in the section below.

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Originally published at Smartgladiator.com on September 03, 2019.

06
Sep 2019
By Puga SankaraLeave a comment
Author:
Puga Sankara
About:
Puga Sankara is the Founder, CEO of Smart Gladiator LLC. Smart Gladiator designs, builds, and delivers market-leading mobile technology for retailers, distributors, and 3PL service providers. So far, Smart Gladiator LoadProof has been used to ship, receive, and scan more than 100 million boxes. SG LoadProof is a patent pending Centralized Enterprise Photo/Video Document System on Cloud for Supply Chain. SG LP is built on the fact that photos & videos are vital docs as important as POs/SOs/Legal Contracts/Fulfillment Orders that reside in ERP/WMS/TMS systems, that serve as compelling, conclusive, unequivocal proof of crucial, critical, vital operations executed in Supply Chain within/across orgs when fulfilling customer orders as well as meeting contractual obligations between orgs as merchandise is transferred between different parties that partake in Supply Chain functions & operations. And these photos/videos data should not be stored in someone’s Smartphone or Email Inbox or in their personal/work Computer, but should be stored in a Centralized Enterprise system, where such data can be pushed into super-fast, stored securely, accessible to all stake holders (CFO/Sales Reps/Customer Support/AR/AP) in an org, as well as facilitates super-fast retrieval/sharing. LP is an Enterprise System of record for Photo/Video docs & is as important as an ERP which is an enterprise system of record for POs, SOs, Legal Contracts between parties etc. that have huge legal ramifications, also as important as a WMS (Warehouse Management System) that hold indispensable shipment & fulfillment data on orders. Like how Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat etc. have evolved into social media platforms/systems that enable individuals to showcase their beauty/pretty clothes/lovely cosmetics/hep coolness etc., LoadProof is an Enterprise system that holds similar photos/videos, but for a different reason, not for show off, but to serve as compelling, conclusive, unequivocal & indisputable system of record and proof that can be presented even in the court of law, when there is a dispute between parties while they execute many facets of the Supply Chain functions & operations. SG LoadProof is also an Enterprise System of Record for Photos, videos and any other digital documents for your Supply Chain Network. A system of record (SOR) or source system of record (SSoR) is a data management term for an information storage system (commonly implemented on a computer system running a database management system) that is the authoritative data source for a given data element or piece of information. The need to identify systems of record can become acute in organizations where management information systems have been built by taking output data from multiple source systems, re-processing this data, and then re-presenting the result for new business use. In these cases, multiple information systems may disagree about the same piece of information. These disagreements may stem from semantic differences, differences in opinion, use of different sources, and differences in the timing of the extract, transform, and load processes that create the data they report against, or may simply be the result of bugs. The integrity and validity of any data set is open to question when there is no traceable connection to a good source, such as a known System of Record. Where the integrity of the data is vital, if there is an agreed system of record, the data element must either be linked to, or extracted directly from it. In other cases, the provenance and estimated data quality should be documented. The “system of record” approach is a good fit for environments where both: 1. there is a single authority over all data consumers, and 2. all consumers have similar needs Here, LoadProof is the System of Record for pictures and videos for all the entities in Supply chain who uses pictures and videos to track using any Supply Chain System infrastructure. 1. LoadProof provides accurate, thorough, complete, and latest information in pictures and videos related to any entity in the Supply chain that is tracked. 2. LoadProof is the single authority on pictures and videos related to any entity in the Supply Chain that is tracked 3. LoadProof doesn’t let any external system to copy the records being stored in it, which eliminates the data being duplicated in multiple places to preserve the data integrity and credibility. 4. LoadProof has a secured login procedure which lets only users with select level access to view the data and modify the records which helps in maintaining LoadProof is becoming the Industry Standard System for Photo & Video Docs for Supply Chain Smart Gladiator is located in ATDC - Advanced Tech Dev Center (tech Incubator) in Georgia Institute of Tech. Click for a demo - https://loadproof.com/apply Puga is a supply chain technology professional with more than 25 years of experience in deploying capabilities in the logistics and supply chain domain. His prior roles involved managing complicated mission-critical programs driving revenue numbers, rolling out a multitude of capabilities involving more than a dozen systems, and managing a team of 30 to 50 personnel across multiple disciplines and departments in large corporations such as Hewlett Packard. He has deployed WMS for more than 30 distribution centers in his role as a senior manager with Manhattan Associates. He has also performed process analysis walk-throughs for more than 50 distribution centers for WMS process design and performance analysis review, optimizing processes for better productivity and visibility through the supply chain. Size of these DCs varied from 150,000 to 1.2 million SQFT. Puga Sankara has an MBA from Georgia Tech. He can be reached at puga@smartgladiator.com or visit the company at www.smartgladiator.com. Also follow him at www.pugasankara.com. [Read More]
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