Setting up a Warehouse

The key resources of a warehouse are space, equipment, and personnel. Good floor plan design, efficient racking and shelving, and well-designed shipping and receiving processes are some of the critical pieces to maintain a successful warehouse operation to seamlessly and efficiently track and move inventory. In setting up an efficiently laid out warehouse, a storage concept first needs to be developed around stationary objects, production/manufacturing equipment, and work areas that make up the core of the business. Warehouse production and storage design should make it efficient for workers to easily navigate and identify storage and work areas. Put Away Rules, introduced in 15.04, should then be configured so that DEACOM can evaluate Locations available for use when workers receive and move inventory in the warehouse.

Configuration

All necessary configuration is discussed in the Process section below.

Process

Designing the warehouse

Facilities, Zones, Location Types, and Locations represent four different “places” where inventory can be identified and stored in DEACOM’s warehousing functions. Described in detail below, and including the implementation of Zones, the warehouse hierarchy is as follows:

  1. Facilities
  2. Zones
  3. Location Types
  4. Locations

Based on the nature of how the four records can be linked, Facilities are discussed first, followed by Location Types, then Locations, and finally Zones.

Using Facilities

Facilities define unique or separate Locations that concentrate resources such as workers, machinery, and other capital. Facilities are not limited to production centers; quite the opposite, Facilities may refer to a distribution or holding Location or a specific segment of a company’s operations, such as a corporate accounting department, point of sale location, or order fulfillment center.

In DEACOM, the Facility master record does much more then store the name and address of the appropriate Facility. The record may contain general ledger posting information specific to the Facility, via GL Overrides, as well as various other inventory and transaction type settings. In addition, the Facility name and address can be printed on reports and documents throughout the system so that prints outs may indicate where materials are being stored, shipped from, or produced.

To add a new Facility:

  1. Navigate to Inventory > Maintenance > Facilities.
  2. Click "New" to display the Edit Facility form.
  3. On the General tab:
    1. Enter a value in the "Name" field to describe the Facility.
    2. Enter all known address and contact information, including Phone, Country Code, and Emergency Contact. These fields are especially important if Dangerous Goods and/or hazardous materials will be shipped from the Facility.
    3. Specify how negative inventory should be handled in this Facility using the "Negative Inventory" pick list.
    4. If inventory transactions should not post for this Facility, check the "Prevent Inventory Transactions" flag. This is mainly used when performing cycle counts and completing a physical inventory.
  4. On the Sales tab:
    1. Specify how material costs will be marked up on Inter-Company Transfers in which this Facility is involved using the "IC Xfer Markup Type" and "Markup Factor" fields.
    2. If using a Scales for transactions such as finishing or shipping in this Facility, complete the "Scale" fields.
    3. Check the remaining desired flags based on company procedures.
  5. On the Production tab:
    1. Determine how produced material will be relieved and incrementally issued.
    2. Check the remaining desired flags based on company procedures.
  6. If GL transactions for this Facility should post to accounts different from the defaults, configure the necessary overrides on the GL Overrides tab.
  7. To join this Facility to others like it based on geographic location, common characteristics, corporate ownership, etc. select a Facility Group on the Facility Groups tab.
  8. If certain Categories, Sub-Categories, Item Search 1-5 fields, Part Exclusions, and/or Restricted Selling Groups apply to this Facility, add them via the Restricted Selling tab.
  9. Assign Tax Regions as necessary using the Tax Regions tab, or if using the TaxJar API, or AvaTax API, leave this tab blank.
  10. If any User Fields are configured for Facility records, use the User Fields tab to complete them.
  11. When printing documents for transactions associated with this Facility, if they should be sent to a Print Destination other than the default, add it to the Print Destinations tab.
  12. Once all the appropriate information has been entered, click the "Save" and "Exit" buttons to complete the process.

Using Location Types

Location Types are used to identify groups of alike and specific Locations within a Facility. Each Location Type that exists within a Facility should be given a unique name. Location Types that exist in multiple Facilities, like Tanks and Racks, should be given names that tie to the Facilities in which they are located. Location Types are an added form of data segregation in DEACOM, accessible to use in drill down Inventory Reporting. A company might set location types to encapsulate a certain aisle, room, or area of the warehouse that stores like items. Using these in reporting aspects can allow users to view inventory, Lots, or other information for a specific group of Locations or area of the warehouse without viewing the entire warehouse.

Note: On all forms where inventory is put away into Locations, a pair of search fields for Location Type and Location will be displayed and must be filled in by the user. The default values for these search boxes may come from the Item Master General 1 tab, the Facility Part Cross Reference if these tabs contain location values, or the default Location Type and Locations specified in the Location Type table and Location tables, respectively.

To add a new Location Type:

  1. Navigate to Inventory > Maintenance > Location Types.
  2. Click "New" to display the Edit Location Type form.
  3. Enter a value in the "Name" field.
  4. Specify how negative inventory should be handled in this Location Type using the "Negative Inventory" pick list.
  5. Select the Facility of which this Location Type is a part.
  6. If inventory transactions should not post for this Location Type, check the "Prevent Inventory Transactions" flag. This is mainly used when performing cycle counts and completing a physical inventory.
  7. Once all the appropriate information has been entered, click the "Save" and "Exit" buttons to complete the process.

Using Locations

Locations are used throughout the system to indicate both where inventory is located and where items will be placed because of various inventory actions, such as receiving a Purchase Order, finishing material, or moving inventory.

DEACOM drives from the Location ID, so names can be changed without impacting inventory transactions. As with any modifications, be sure to test changes in a test environment before pushing to production. Any grids or filters set up to drive by a Location Name that is being changed will need to be re-configured. Additionally, if a Location Name is being deactivated rather than re-named, the inventory in that Location will need to be moved to a new Location before deactivating the record.

Note: On all forms where inventory is put away into Locations, a pair of search fields for Location Type and Location will be displayed and must be filled in by the user. The default values for these search boxes may come from the Item Master General 1 tab, the Facility Part Cross Reference if these tabs contain location values, or the default Location Type and Locations specified in the Location Type table and Location tables, respectively.

To add a new Location:

  1. Navigate to Inventory > Maintenance > Locations.
  2. Click "New" to display the Edit Location form.
  3. Enter a value in the "Name" field. Keep in mind the following naming considerations to ensure ease of use:
    1. This field is a 30 character text field, which should not be a limitation. However, depending on the barcode used to mark the locations, there might be other restrictions. For example, 3 of 9 barcodes cannot represent lower case letters or special characters like % and &, so if a 3 of 9 barcode is to be used to label Locations, upper case letters, numbers, dashes, and spaces should be used.
    2. Location sort is alphabetic, not numeric. If row A has 30 racks, it is best to identify them as A-01, A-02, …, A-30 so that they sort correctly. If the leading zeroes are omitted, A1 will be followed alphabetically by A-10, A-11, ....
    3. The use of dashes, or not, is based on preference to assist with human readability (like the dashes in phone numbers). Most people cannot process a list of 7 or 8 numbers without a break built in. To the computer and scanner, A01B07 is the same as A-01-B-07, but the dashes provide a natural break between fields representing room, row, rack and shelf respectively. If a user is scanning the location tags rather than manually typing them, the extra characters do not make the processing slower. Dashes also help to break up the Location name into known segments. If the users know that the second segment in A-01-B-07 is always a two-digit number, they will not wonder whether the number “1” is perhaps a lower case “i". Alternative letter and number blocks also help with user expectations of what a valid Location field looks like. Once again, the scanner will not care, but end users might.
    4. It is possible to have pick lists printed by Location. If the company plans on printing pick lists by Location and that should result in a smooth path through the warehouse, the setup should not be the first Location at the front of every rack. This means that Location A-01 is not necessarily across from Location B-01. If the last Location in a row is A-30, B-01 should be setup directly across so that the stock picker can smoothly continue his/her count without walking back to the start of the aisle. This method is also referred to as snake picking.
  4. Enter a short description of the Location to assist employees in determining its location or purpose in the warehouse.
  5. Select the Location Type of which this Location is a part.
  6. Select the Unit in which material capacity is measured and define the total capacity for this Location using that unit in the "Capacity Unit" and "Capacity" fields, respectively.
  7. Using the "Location Sequence" field, specify the sequence the system should use when determining where material should be placed when using the WMS Putaway function.
    1. The Putaway logic is as follows: Once the "Putaway" button is clicked, the system will start with the default Location on the Item Master to see if there is enough space in that Location to store the Lot. If there is not enough room, the system will check each Location beginning with the next "Location Sequence" number listed after the default Location.
    2. Example: If the default Location has a "Location Sequence" of 50 and there is not enough room, the system will look for a "Location Sequence" of 51 and so on, looping back to 1 once the last number is reached, until a Location with sufficient room is found.
  8. If inventory transactions should not post for this Location, check the "Prevent Inventory Transactions" flag. This is mainly used when performing cycle counts and completing a physical inventory.
  9. Once all the appropriate information has been entered, click the "Save" and "Exit" buttons to complete the process.

Using Zones

An optional part of the warehouse hierarchy in DEACOM, Zones represent a group of inventory Locations within a Facility that may be used to improve the efficiency of picking for both Jobs and Sales Orders. While Locations are always bound to Location Types, a Zone can encompass Locations from a variety of different Location Types making them a bit more flexible. Operators are often User Restricted to specific Zones, meaning they can only pick and pull inventory for that order from those Locations, while others in the warehouse pick for the same order in their assigned Zone. When a user is restricted to Zone, they can only issue, pick, and ship (without assigning Lots) from within their Zones. When issuing, reserving, shipping, moving, or staging, users are limited within the Lot Chooser form to only seeing inventory within their restricted Zone.

The efficiencies gained from dividing a warehouse into Zones can be quite significant based on the business’ operations. The efficiency is driven from workers not needing to travel as far on forklifts or on foot to gather required materials. Additionally, many companies divide the warehouses up into Zones by stocking unit to drive picking efficiency. One Zone might contain pallets of the material that require a forklift driver to get while another Zone has loose cases of the product that can be picked by a worker with a handcart. Finally, efficiencies are gained through Zone picking by allowing workers to specialize in their specific Zone rather than having to become familiar with the entire warehouse.

A useful method to configure Zones is to separate them by allergens, temperature needs, organic/non-organic, etc. The use of zones is helpful in situations where large orders require more than one person to pick the order to save time and effort. For example, If the warehouse is set up by aisles A-Z. One person is picking in aisles A-D (Zone A to D) another picking in E-J (Zone E to J) etc. As previously mentioned, there are also restrictions available by Zone. The "Zone" field on the Facility Part Cross Reference restricts what inventory can be received to only Locations within the destination Location's Zone. This is useful for situations where companies need to restrict items to certain areas of the warehouse. For example, certain materials can only be stored in the cooler. This "Zone" field on the cross reference will direct users to the cooler and not allow users to move this product into a non-cooler Location. For information on User Restrictions, refer to Managing Users and User Security.

Note: Beginning in version 16.07.007, the "Zones" field is available in Inventory Reporting and allows users to report on inventory based on all the inventory locations within a Zone.

To add a new Zone:

  1. Navigate to Inventory > Maintenance > Zones.
  2. Click "New" to display the Edit Zone form.
  3. Enter a value in the "Name" field.
  4. Select the Facility of which this Zone is a part.
  5. If inventory transactions should not post for this Zone, check the "Prevent Inventory Transactions" flag. This is mainly used when performing cycle counts and completing a physical inventory.
  6. To add Locations to this Zone:
    1. Click "Add" to open the Edit Location form.
    2. Select the desired Location then click "Next" to add more Locations or "Save" and "Exit" to get back to the Edit Zone form. Note that Locations can be placed within multiple Zones if necessary.
  7. If multiple Locations were added to the Zone, but they are not in the desired order, use the "Sort" button to rearrange them.
  8. Once all information has been entered, click the "Save" and "Exit" buttons to complete the process.

Designing Put Away Rules

To create a new Put Away Rule, perform the below steps. For information on how DEACOM evaluates existing rules and the logic used to suggest put away locations, refer to the Put Away Rules Encyclopedia page. Best practice information on putting inventory away in a warehouse may be found in Putting Away Inventory.

  1. Navigate to Inventory > Maintenance > Put Away Rules.
  2. Click "New" to open the Edit Put Away Rule form.
  3. Determine if the rule should apply to all Parts or specific segments of Parts then make the appropriate selections in the "For Type" and "Category/Part Number/Sub-Category" fields.
  4. Determine if the rule should apply to all Locations or specific sections of the warehouse hierarchy then make the appropriate selections in the "To Type" and "Facility/Location/Location Type" fields.
  5. Determine if the rule must take Location Capacity into consideration then make the appropriate selections in the "Capacity Type", "Capacity", and "Capacity Unit" fields.
  6. Determine if the rule must take into consideration any existing inventory stored in the Location(s) then make the appropriate selection in the "Existing Inventory" field.
  7. Determine if the rule must take into consideration the Inventory segment, QC status, and/or existing Lots stored in the Location(s) then make the appropriate selections in the "Inventory Type", "QC Status", and "Lot Number" fields.
  8. Review the list of Locations that populate in the Location Sort section of the Edit Put Away Rule form and confirm they are correct. If not, modify the field selections until the correct Locations are listed.
  9. If necessary, use the "Sort" button to reorder the sequence of Locations then make the appropriate selection in the "Sort" field to determine the order in which the system should suggest the various Locations.
  10. Once all selections have been made and the Locations listed are in the proper sequence, click "Save" to save the rule then exit the Edit Put Away Rule form.
  11. Repeat steps 2-10 to create additional Put Away Rules as needed.
    1. Note: In the Edit Put Away Rule form, the "Same As" button may be used to copy an existing rule to use as the foundation for a new rule.