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WavePlanning PDF
WavePlanning PDF
WavePlanning PDF
Though work planning is an integral part of daily operations, you may not have the
ability to preview orders prior to releasing them to the warehouse for order fulfillment.
You may also not know how much labor is required to fulfill those orders in the
warehouse on any given day or week.
After you release the material to the warehouse for picking, you have limited visibility to
the status of the picks, cannot make adjustments to the pick batch, or take actions on
exceptions when necessary. This can lead to operational inefficiencies, missed shipments,
and backordering of material, which can be avoided.
Prior to release 12.1 WMS used the pick release process for order fulfillment. With the
pick release process, you were not able to preview which orders to fulfill, and determine
if material was readily available in the warehouse. Even if material was readily available,
the system could backorder the material based on rules engine allocations. Additionally,
you could not preview warehouse workload or how many resources were available at any
given time to fulfill the required demand.
In Release 12.1, wave planning was introduced to enhance visibility to the order
fulfillment process. You can now determine which sales orders will be fulfilled in a pick
batch before releasing the pick batch to the warehouse for order fulfillment. You can also
estimate the amount of work required to fulfill the orders as well as view the existing
work load within the warehouse. Finally you can monitor the progress of the pick tasks
within the wave and add make modifications as necessary. The following illustration
depicts the wave planning process:
Create Wave
Create Plan Wave Release Monitor
Wave Simulate Wave / Wave Adapt / Cancel
Plan Labor Re-Release
The allocation method you select determines from where the material will be sourced.
You can choose to source the material from Inventory, Cross dock Only, Prioritize
Inventory, or Prioritize Cross dock. If you choose Inventory Only, then only material
which resides in on-hand locations will be considered to fulfill orders. Inbound material
which is available through cross docking will not be considered to fulfill orders. If you
selected Cross dock Only, then only inbound material will be considered to fulfill the
sales order demand. On-hand material will not be considered. If you choose either
Prioritize Inventory or Prioritize Cross dock, then both inbound material and on-hand
material will be considered. The order of the material considered to fulfill the allocations
depends on your selection. For example, if you choose Prioritize Inventory, the system
looks at all supply in on-hand locations before looking at inbound material to fulfill
demand.
After you have chosen your selection criteria and release criteria you can create the wave
online, or by using a concurrent request. If desired you can also choose to plan and /or
release the wave during the initiation process.
Note: If you want to perform pull replenishment for the select wave, the Pull
Replenishment check box and ensure that the appropriate set up steps are complete.
3 Planning a Wave
Before you release the wave, you can perform material fulfillment planning and labor
planning. Fulfillment planning verifies that enough material is available to fulfill the
sales orders within the wave. Labor planning establishes the number of workers the
number of workers required to perform the work in the wave and checks the existing
workload within the warehouse.
WMS also offers two types of planning, rules-based planning, and availability check
planning. When you use rules-based planning the system simulates the rules engine
allocation, and if enabled, the labor to perform the picks. When you use availability
check the system verifies the material exists in the organization, and if you enable labor
planning, simulates the labor required to perform the picks. The following sections
contain information on how to plan a wave. You can either plan a wave using online
processing, or run wave planning as a concurrent request. If you use online processing,
all other transactions will stop while you are planning the wave. You must use
concurrent processing if you choose to use rules-based planning.
Warning: When you plan the wave the estimated start time must be greater than the
current system time, or the system will not plan the wave.
Note: Zones are not used to establish picking paths, but are only for planning purposes.
If you use Rules-Based planning you can also specify the outbound operation plan used
for your organization as well as simulate the labor required to perform planned cross
docking.
The following example details the differences between Rules-Based Planning and
Availability Check planning. You have a sales order for Item WM100 for 25 and your
picking rule is set to pick the item from the EACH subinventory only with No LPN
allocation as the allocation mode.
The following table shows the availability of item WM100 within your organization.
If you run Availability Check as the planning method, the material fulfillment will appear
as 100% and the system will plan one task for 25 for the BULK subinventory. The
system does not consider the picking rules which are used during the allocation process.
If you use Rules-Based Planning as the Planning Method, the system will consider the
Picking rule assigned the item, and the fulfillment rate will be 28%. The system will plan
one task for 7 eaches for the EACH subinventory. If you choose to release the wave, then
system will allocate the 7 eaches available for the order and backorder the rest of the line,
because WM100 is sourced from the EACH subinventory. If however, you have multiple
rules set up to look at EACH and BULK, then the system will allocate at 100% as well.
Note: The behavior of the system will also change in this scenario if you selected one of
the items under the Planning Actions if On-hand Stock is not Available alternative
region. For example if you selected backorder line, then the system will back order the
entire line if you run rules-based planning.
You must establish a default UOM conversion for every picking UOM, for example a
case UOM, a pallet UOM. You can also establish item-level conversions. The item level
conversion takes precedence over the standard UOM conversion.
Note: When you are using rules-based planning, the system considers the allocation
UOM during labor planning.
Figure 14 Unit of Measure Conversions Window
The Labor Statistics tab displays the Resources available for the tasks, and the associated
capacities. You can view the total capacity of the resource, The Total existing work load,
and the Planned Work Load for the wave. The chart shows the number of tasks for the
wave which correspond to the graph.
After you have reviewed the results of the wave plan, you can make adjustments as
needed, re-plan the wave, and then release it to the warehouse.
Figure 17 Wave Workbench Labor Statistics Tab
4 Wave Release
After you make the needed adjustments to the wave, you release it to the warehouse.
You can use online processing or a concurrent request to release a wave to release the
wave from the wave dashboard. You can also schedule the Wave Release concurrent
request to run at regular intervals.
6 Implementation Considerations
You can implement wave planning in many different ways: consider the following when
implementing wave planning
• Determine if you want to manually plan the wave, or plan waves automatically
using concurrent requests.
• Determine the selection criteria used to plan waves.
• If you plan on using Pull Replenishment, verify all replenishment setups have
been performed.
• Determine if Rules-Based Planning or Availability Check is the best method for
your warehouse.
• If using rules-based planning, verify that your labor set up utilizes all of the
subinventories which the rules pull from. This will ensure a complete picture
with rules based planning.
• Determine the Labor Setup Mode for your warehouse Zone to Zone or
Subinventories.
• If using Zone to Zone verify that all of your labor zones are set up properly.
• When adding lines to an unreleased wave, you will be able to re-plan the wave;
the system will re-calculate the all of the necessary calculations for planning
purposes.
• Expected fill rate and actual fill rate may differ after release due to replenishment.
• If exception reporting does not appear to be working, consider the hierarchy for
reporting exceptions: dock door appointment, scheduled ship date, and finally,
expected ship date.
• The system considers the lowest common denominator when reporting
exceptions.
7 Summary
Wave planning enables you to select and group orders for fulfillment, plan the resources
for optimal utilization, and finally monitor the progress of orders through the fulfillment
process. It enables you optimize your work planning to more accurately predict the
resources and material required to fulfill demand.
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