Introduction to supported scenarios
For the Fall release of Dynamics 365 for Operations (1611) we have built
various features to support the theme of increasing the flexibility in the
daily operations of warehouse workers.
Imagine the following scenarios:
Scenario 1
A company has a relatively small receiving
area, and it’s congested with pallets and boxes awaiting put away. A large
shipment is expected on this day, so the receiving clerk decides to clear up
the receiving area, moving some of the pallets to a secondary inbound staging
area.
Scenario 2
An experienced warehouse worker going
around the warehouse notices an opportunity to consolidate items in one
location instead of having them spread out across 3 nearby locations with a
little quantity in each. He wants to move items from each of these locations into
the same location onto the same license plate, consolidating the quantity.
Scenario 3
A pallet is awaiting shipment in a staging
location, say, STAGE01, which is near BAYDOOR01. However due to a change of plans
the truck is going to arrive to BAYDOOR04. The shipping clerk is aware of this and
needs to ensure the truck does not have to hang around waiting to be loaded
from STAGE01. The shipping clerk therefore decides to move the items in that
shipment from STAGE01 to STAGE04, much closer to their new destination.
All of these scenarios are not possible
today due to one simple fact – the items that need to be moved have work
pending for them, meaning they are physically reserved on the warehouse
location level (or even the license plate level) and therefore cannot be moved.
We have built this capability in for the
Fall release of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Operations (1611). Now you can decide, which warehouse
workers are allowed to move reserved inventory, and which are not. This will
allow some regulated warehouses the flexibility for cases where they may not
accept that a worker can decide upon a new pick location from an already
created pick work, or that a warehouse manager would like to steer which
capabilities his un-experienced worker should have.
Scenario 2 walkthrough
In the standard demo data in company USMF
we already have some data that can help showcase this new scenario on warehouse
24.
There are two sales orders, order 000748
and order 000752, both of which are planning to ship 10 pcs of A0001, and both
have been released to warehouse, so corresponding work orders USMF-000001 and
USMF-000002 exist, both to pick 10 pcs of A0001 from location FL-001. There is
a total of 100 pcs of A0001 in this location, but only 80 is physically
available because of the two work order reservations.
So if warehouse worker 24 tried to open the
Movement mobile device menu item on his mobile device, he would see the
following picture for location FL-001:
Moving physically available quantity |
As
you can see, the worker is only allowed to move 80 of the 100 pcs physically
present in the location. Let’s fix that, and configure the worker to allow him
moving reserved inventory.
Configure worker to allow movement of inventory with associated work |
Now,
if we go into the movement flow on the mobile device again, the screen will
look as below:
Moving all physical inventory from a location |
Now
that the worker is allowed to move reserved inventory, he can move all 100 pcs
of item A0001. Let’s go ahead and do that, moving the items to FL-007 to a new
license plate LP_V_001.
Movement of inventory - To information |
Let’s
now review what happened behind the scenes:
- A new Inventory Movement work was created, from FL-001 to FL-007, for 100 pcs of A0001. It was immediately executed, and there the Work status is Closed.
- All related work orders will be updated, so they point the Pick line to location FL-007 instead of location FL-001, as you can see on the screenshot below.
Work order after inventory was moved to FL-007 |
Now
location FL-001 is empty and can be used according to what warehouse worker 24
had in mind, for example, to put away the goods just reported as finished (and
FL-007 was smaller in size and did not fit the RAFed pallet).
The
other two scenarios are pretty much the same in terms of the flow, with the
only difference being the reservations behind.
Current limitations
- The work reservations that are possible to move as of today are limited to Sales order, Transfer order issue, Transfer order receipt, Purchase order and Replenishment.
- Moving the items is restricted in a way that prevents splitting of work lines. So if you have a work line for 100 pcs of item A from location Loc1, you won’t be able to move only, say, 30 pcs of item A from there to another location, as that would lead to split of the existing work line to 30 and 70, as the locations are now different.
- For Staging scenarios, where the license plate we move the goods from, or the license plate we move the goods to, are set as a Target LP for a work order, only movement of the entire LP is allowed, so as not to break up the Target LP.
- Only the ad hoc movement is currently supported. That means you will not be able to move reserved inventory through the movement by template mobile device menu items.
For those behind on updates :)
This feature has also been back-ported to Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 and will be available as part of CU12.
It can also be downloaded individually through KB number 3192548
This is great stuff, give it a try and let us know if you have any feedback!
Thanks
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