Packs
- Bart Friederichs
Introduction
StockControl supports the usage of what is called “packs”. A pack is fixed collection of items of a certain article, for example a box or a pallet. Packs can be created through the Article Editor, see also Article Management . This page is about how packs are handled in the system.
Terms and structure
Articles can be administered as a tree of SKUs. Each article always has a “Customer Unit” or CU. From this CU, packs can be derived. To create a pack, a new SKU (record in the wms_article table) is created, with two values set: the subarticleid and refarticleid. The subarticle refers to the record that this pack has inside. The ref (reference) article refers to the CU record, i.e. the article that the end user wants to process.
Example
You sell shampoo. A single bottle would be the CU, as this is what your customers can buy. Your supplier sends you the bottles in boxes of 20. Those boxes are a pack with multiplier 20, subarticle is the bottle, as is the refarticle. This is a very popular product, so you also store pallets with 24 boxes. The pallet is another pack, with multiplier 480 (24 boxes × 20 bottles), its subarticle is the box and the refarticle is the bottle.
Putting on stock
During inspect, the operator can put packs on stock if they exist. This is done by selecting the correct pack in the inspect screen. This is a manual process, so it is important that the operator is trained well. Errors are made easily here, but unfortunately it is not easy to protect that with software. An option is to use different barcodes per pack, but this is often not possible in the real world.
When packs are placed on stock, the stock overview will show the amount of CUs available. “Under the hood” though, the packs are stored.
Order picking
During the order start, StockControl will make an effort to create as few picks as possible. For example if the order needs 10 CUs, and there is a box of 10 available, it will assign that box to the orderline, leading to a single pick.
In the order start run, the system will:
Look for the largest pack that satisfies the order line.
If they are not available anymore, it will go to smaller packs.
If after checking all existing packs on stock, there are still lines unassigned, it will “break” the smallest available pack.
After breaking, the loop will restart, until nothing can be broken further.
During order picking, the amount of items to pick, will be updated to show the number of packs.
Example
You have an order of 25 bottles of shampoo. The orderline says 25 when the order is in new:
Shampoo 25
After the order has been started, you will have two order lines (assuming your stock has enough boxes and CUs):
20 × Shampoo (box) 1
Shampoo 5
Caveats
Once a pack is opened (i.e. replaced for its subpacks), it will never be closed again. This is because we can never be 100% sure that the original pack still exists, even though the correct number of subpacks might exist.