I’ve researched primary bins and understand their purpose, but I’m curious if anyone here actually uses them. If you do, have you encountered any issues? What benefits have you noticed?
They are good if you plan on using the replenish workbench or you want to control what bin something backflushes from and not use resource groups to do it. Prim bin is like number 3 or 4 in the backflush hierarchy.
It can also be helpful if you are planning on using the material queue for things like putaway.
A receipt to a bin that is not the primary generates a mtl queue to do a move to the primary bin. so if you have different teams that do your receipts and your putaway it can help.
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Primary bins are exactly that. If you have a primary location where you want to store a given part, you define a primary bin for it. By definition, there can be only one (per warehouse).
Once defined, transactions will default to the primary bin for that part/warehouse.
If you don’t store the same parts in the same location all the time(or at least long periods of time), then it doesn’t really offer you anything and there’s no point in using it.
I’d argue they are kind of necessary for any sort of automatic-ness of… something.
The big problem is, what is the something?
So, imagine:
- You make part 12345 in house, and it is made to stock
- When part 12345 is completed, it sits in the PAINT-OUT location (bin)
- Bulk (overflow) of the part is stored in location AA01
- You use this part as a component of part 67890
- You want to backflush 12345 from bin BB35 (when there is a job for part 67890)
Which of those 3 locations is the primary bin for part 67890?
- If you want to auto receive, PAINT-OUT needs to be the primary
- If you expect the material queue to suggest a move to the bulk location, AA01 needs to be primary
- If you want backflushing to be specific to that part number, BB35 needs to be the primary
But you may want all (or two) of those things! But you can only have one primary bin…
So, it’s hard to say which something you should gear towards.
Also, you may try to resolve this with multiple warehouses. I would say that’s a bad idea, as does @Nancy_Hoyt
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Three warehouses within our HQ…we’re primarily make-to-stock so it works for us: the manufacturing side (components etc), shipping (the main warehouse, cases/pallets being shipped), pick-and-pack/ecommerce (shipping eaches or broken cartons). Really depends on your operation as to whether multi-warehouse will work.
We set primary bins so they default for inventory transfers and adjustments.
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Since the MtlSeq numbers in our BOMs don’t represent anything in particular, and especially not the order we want stuff picked from the shelves for jobs, we use the primary bin’s BinSeq and the bin number itself to sort our pick lists. Bin numbers are mostly like A-01-01 for us (section, shelf, bin), but the sections aren’t ordered A-Z in an optimal picking order, so we’ve got something like:
0 - G-12 thru G-17, H-12 thru H-17, MM-E, MM-F, MM-O, W-04, W-05
1 - A, B, Y, Z
2 - C, D, E, H-01, H-03, X
3 - F, G-02, J, V
4 - more A, more B, C-05, the rest of G and H
5 - I, J
6 - N, Q
7 - R, S
8 - U
9 - packaging areas POU and table racks
10 - ???
11 - closets and offices
etc…
300 - a few F bins at the end, maybe backflushed parts, idk
997, 998, 999 - shouldn’t normally be picked from, always sort to the end
…with a bunch of bins that don’t fit the naming scheme thrown into various places in the sequence.
Curious - do the same parts exist in multiple warehouses? If so, is that a good thing in your view?
There are pros and cons to that (same part in many warehouses in one site). I just found that in practice, no one cared about the discipline required to make that function well, so it was a disaster for us. It can work; it’s just… rare.
I feel stupid… where is this field (assume it’s a field)? WhseBin table?
If I had some sort of bogus sort to do on bins, I have used Aisle in the past.
They do but it’s manageable…we have some parts we sell from both warehouse and pick-pack. Replenish the pick-pack side from the general warehouse as needed. The manufacturing side is more or less its own silo.
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