As in the case of replenishing overall inventory to ensure customer satisfaction, the warehouse also has to replenish its pick faces regularly to ensure picker satisfaction. An empty picking slot, just like an empty shelf location in store can mean a lost sale. The result of a poor replenishment process is order shortages, increased picking times and therefore increased cost per pick and an overall reduction in service level.
Real-time WMSs will recognize the need to replenish pick locations through real-time data transfer. These systems are also able to identify the total actual order quantities and therefore replenish before the next wave of orders arriveon the warehouse floor.
Other systems will rely on a trigger that denotes when the stock level within a pick face falls to a certain level. This will rely heavily on timing as orders that have generated pick lists may not actually have been picked and therefore replenishment has been triggered early. Late replenishment can result
where staff have picked out of sequence, for example, and emptied the pick bays before the replenishment team have had an opportunity to top up the location. Timing is crucial. An early instruction to replenish can cause as many problems as late replenishment, with potentially overfull pick faces and issues with FIFO.
If product can be moved directly to the pick face from the inbound section this cuts out a number of processes. This will require a certain amount of preplanning to ensure that pick faces are not overfilled. Pallets can be de-layered to correspond with expected pick quantities.
In the absence of a warehouse management system the warehouse manager will need to first ensure that the pick faces are designed to take the optimum quantity of product based on predicted sales per day or per shift and cubic volume, and staff need to be trained to identify replenishment requirements
and inform either the supervisor or the forklift truck driver, depending on how the process has been set up.
One other point to note here is that although real time dictates that replenishment and picking can occur simultaneously, there are issues of worker safety if forklift trucks and pedestrian pickers are working together in the same aisle. This can be alleviated by incorporating multiple picking locations for the same SKU, the utilization of flow racking where product is replenished from a
separate aisle and by carrying out the two activities at different times of the day
if feasible. For example, receiving and replenishment can take place in the morning whilst picking takes place in the afternoon. Alternatively, replenishment can take place during breaks or after picking has been completed for the day. This mirrors what happens at retail stores here shelf replenishment takes place when stores are closed overnight. Bendi’s introduction of their combined articulated truck and picker will also go some way to alleviate the problem of empty pick faces whilst picking.
Value-adding services
Many warehouses have introduced areas where value-adding services can be carried out. These are common in both dedicated and shared-user or public warehouses where third-party logistics companies are providing an all-encompassing service to their customers.
These value-adding services include the following:
●(re)labelling;
● pricing;
● tagging and kimballing;
● (re)packing;
● bundling, as in ‘buy one, get one free’ (BOGOF) offers;
● reconfiguration;
● sub-assembly;
● repair and refurbishment.
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