I have 4 bins that I would like to track. 2 at building A and 2 at building B. Each building has 2 silo’s - one for white molding pellets and one for blue molding pellets. These silo’s ALWAYS contain the same exact material. We know how much weight of said material can be held within each silo.
for example:
bldg A
100,000 lbs
100,000, lbs
bldg B
80,000 lbs
80,000 lbs
we purchase and inventory the material in lbs.
I’ve been looking at Warehouse Bin Maintenance for these specific bins under the Fulfillment header.
The checkbox for “Wave Replenishable” when researched said the following. Select the Wave Replenishable check box if this bin should be included when performing wave picking in this warehouse. ((this is not applicable for my purposes)). Although the explanation for this is rather vague… it almost seemed to me at first that you must check the box in order to use the Wave max fill and wave percent fillable functionality. However; this seems to be more for use with fulfillment workbench for picking.
The two following options “Wave Max Fill” and “Wave Percent Fillable” have no information at all on any help articles I have read. These descriptions also reference the fulfillment workbench…
In the field help however…
Wave Max Fill says
Specifies the maximum fillable quantity for this warehouse bin. The default is zero and can be overridden. The Epicor application uses this in Fulfillment Workbench processing. This field is reserved for future use, and is not currently being used in Fulfillment Workbench functionality.
Wave Percent Fillable says…
Specifies the fillable percentage for this warehouse bin. The default is zero and can be overridden. The Epicor application uses this in Fulfillment Workbench processing. This field is reserved for future use, and is not currently being used in Fulfillment Workbench functionality.
Has anyone else played with this functionality? Or is it just options for future use (as it says) with no current built in functionality? These options seem to be exactly what I would need in order for purchasing to know when to plan replenishment for all 4 individual silo’s.
It would be nice for purchasing to have some visibility as to the fullness of these specific bins. It seems this functionality is more for use with fulfillment… but could I potentially use this for my purpose? I’m unsure of how these would relate specifically to fulfillment based upon the field help.
I don’t really understand the “Wave” functionality either. There is some information on the “Allocation Wave Tracker” help if you care to read through it, but like you’ve found, it appears to be more on the picking/order fulfillment side of things.
Since you said you ALWAYS hold the same material (and you don’t have to worry about changes in polymer weight/volume) and therefore the weight of a full silo is constant… I guess, if I had to tackle this, I would approach it using lot tracking of the resin.
So, if you receive in 100,000 lbs of Lot (1) into Silo A, that’s your starting point. Once you consume 50,000 lbs of Lot (1), you know you have available volume to hold another bulk truck and can order to replenish.
You order 50,000 lbs and receive it as Lot (2). So, yes, they’re both in Silo A, but if you’re tracking lots, you can look at the shiny new “Part Quantity Tracker”… pull up Silo A… and you’ll see you have 50,000 lbs of Lot (1) and 50,000 lbs of Lot (2)… and know your silo should be full.
Your next order calls for 20,000 lbs… you pull this from Silo A… if someone looks at Part Quantity Tracker, they would then see 30,000 lbs of Lot (1) and 50,000 lbs of Lot (2).
That is a great idea. Unfortunately for our situation it wont work. I left out some additional details without thinking to add them.
The material in the silo’s will actually backflush. We allow the floor (the location we are backflushing from) to go negative and than we do a material move to cover the negative.
Ill read the allocation wave tracker help though, maybe there is something there.
Thanks for pointing out Part Quantity Tracker though! I hadn’t noticed that! Schnazzy!
I don’t think backflushing would matter, right? Technically I don’t think you NEED lot tracking either. If you look at inventory of a particular Bin, it should tell you the quantity (weight) that’s in that bin.
We don’t backflush, so I’m not sure, if you held the same part in multiple locations, whether you can dictate where the backflushed qty comes from. So, if you had the resin in a silo but also had some in gaylords in your warehouse… not sure where that gets pulled from.
But I think backflushing is more just a matter of timing.
If Purchasing looks at the tracker and saw an on-hand qty, they just wouldn’t know that your guys on the floor already pulled X lbs out of the silo until after the operation/job/etc. Then it backflushes and catches up.
Actually. Part Quantity Tracker would be work for monitoring this.
for example. Blue pellets
Silo 1A 80,000lbs
Silo1B 30,000lbs
Floor A -1000lbs
Floor B - -400 lbs
This will work actually because purchasing would be able to see it all in one place. They can see what the negative is in the backflush location for them all. So even though Silo1A has 80,000lbs - they can see that FloorA is -1000. So the actual quantity in the Silo1A would be 79,000lbs. It doesn’t give us fill percent but very easy to use this. This would work actually rather well.
our pellets pull through a feeding system directly from the silo. But we can only backflush these operations from one location which in this instance is “Floor”. As there are multiple materials to backflush as you mentioned other gaylords of material etc.
Part Quantity Tracker is nice. Makes it easy to deduce fill rate.
