I’m curious how others are managing their picking process using Epicor MWW. We are in the testing phase of implementing handhelds and I am trying to design a process that eliminates paper completely from the fulfillment process. The Wireless Warehouse application is very simple to use from a technical standpoint but I am stumped on how to put it into practice. Here is the proposed process, at a very high level:
Sales Order Entry is completed and quantity is allocated and released for picking via fulfillment workbench.
The material queue displays the pending pick and the pick is assigned to a picker
The pick shows in EMWW on the picker’s handheld device under “My Material Queue”
The picker goes to the location indicated on the material queue and picks the items, placing them in a tote. In Epicor, completing this material queue record moves the product from it’s primary bin to our “Shipping” bin.
Once all of the picks for that sales order are complete and in the tote, the tote is placed on the conveyor to be packed and shipped (note: there may be several other totes already on the conveyor from a variety of different pickers and sales orders).
The shipping department retrieves the tote off the conveyor and theoretically would go into Customer Shipment Entry and select “Picked Orders” from the actions menu to pull the picks into the pack for shipment.
The problem is on that last step. How does the shipper know what sales order/pick the tote that they are retrieving goes with if there is a line of totes, each for a different sales order? In order to do the “Picked Orders” function, they would need to know the sales order that they are shipping, which wouldn’t be easily discernible in a completely paperless process with only the picked parts in the tote.
My two thoughts are some sort of label/tag being printed when the pick is completed to go in/on the tote -or- having each tote set up as an individual warehouse bin and the picker would scan that as the “to” location for the pick so that they wouldn’t go into the default shipping bin.
I want the solution to be simple to use, so I am looking for feedback or ideas on how other Epicor users are completing this step.
We are still implementing also and are looking to use a similar process. We do plan to start with the paper SO pick lists and do plan to print a tag at the time of picking that will indicate the sales order the parts are for.
We are not planning to use the Epicor Mobile Warehouse screens as they are not customizable as I understand it, but we plan to use a laptop and the AMM material queue screens to do the process.
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I have started testing with PCID and it seems to fit the bill very well.
One more question: Is there any serialization involved in your use case? The one issue that I have run into with PCID is the serial number carrying over to the shipment. When I do the picking process and select a PCID, it asks me to enter/select serial numbers to track the serialized parts moving to the PCID but when I enter that PCID on a shipment and it generates all the lines, I have to select the serial numbers again (I would have thought the serial numbers that were moved to the PCID would have automatically carried over onto the shipment). Not sure if this is a bug or intended functionality.
We do serialization and never have to re-enter the serial numbers on packing. That was one of the main benefits of using the PCIDs. If you look at the Package Control ID does it show the list of serial numbers?
I have had some issues with Serial Numbers in BPMs. Do you have any BPMs controling/analyzing your packing/shipping process?
No BPMs interfering (I disabled all BPMs through web.config just to be sure).
Basically, when I do the pick, I get an error if I don’t select serial numbers, so I open the Serial Numbers dialog and retrieve/select the serial numbers I want. Then when I go to Customer Shipment Entry, I create a new Pack and enter the PCID, which creates my pack lines and populates part numbers, quantities, etc. but when I try to save the shipment record, I get the same error about the number of serial numbers not matching, so I have to go into the serial number dialog again at that step and select my serial numbers.
If others are using a similar process and not experiencing that issue, I am assuming it is a version-specific bug (10.2.400.13) or I have a configuration wrong somewhere.
As I remember PCID functionality, it was brought on in sections. It started in 10.1.600 or early 10.2 days and I think the full feature functionality was completed in 10.2.600, so It would not surprise me that there are differences between these two versions.
This is true. I don’t think it is fully matured either.
That being said, we did all of our testing before go live in 10.2.500 and this worked then. So I’m guessing maybe something changed between 400 and 500 that allowed it to start pulling those S/N…