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. 

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.