QAD Warehousing lets you group several different work, sales, or distribution orders containing the same item, and then pick a bulk amount of stock, regardless of order. This process is called bulk picking. The following topics describe how bulk picking works.

About Bulk Picking
Discusses bulk picking.

Key Concepts
Illustrates the key concepts of bulk picking, including bulk pick details, load ID, temporary sequence ID, and pre-shipper ID.

Setting Up Bulk Picking
Outlines Bulk Picking Control (4.14.24) and its uses.

Processing Bulk Pick Orders
Describes the basic bulk pick workflow and discusses how to select and approve order lines for bulk pricing, modify and print bulk pick orders, create pre-shippers, and confirm transactions.

Shipping Bulk Pick Orders
Discusses the processes involved in preparing bulk-picked items for shipping, including a shipment workflow, obtaining shipper numbers, and issuing goods.

Displaying Bulk Pick Data
Lists and describes the inquiries and reports used to display buck pick data.

Archiving/Deleting Empty Bulk Picks
Describes how to use Empty Bulk Pick Delete/Archive (4.14.23) to delete or archive bulk packing data that is no longer needed.

In a warehouse, it is inefficient if staff have to visit the same area more than once in a short period of time. Picking stock needs to be managed so that this happens as little as possible. The orders that can be collected to form a bulk pick are sales, distribution, and works orders.

When orders are created, you can optionally group them together into routes. You can request orders by route, so that all orders for a particular delivery area can be picked together. When creating sales orders, the route can be defined by customer and the ship-to address. For distribution orders the route can be defined by customer and the ship-to site address. Works orders can be grouped together in a similar way.

These bulk picks accumulate the items together, and, using the defined picking rules, issue the instructions to the staff to pick the stock. Efficiency is improved by grouping the orders, since the detail allocations are examined and, if necessary, the allocations rationalized. There is no direct link between orders in a bulk pick, other than the fact that they have items in common and can thus be grouped together.

By using replenishment and viewing the planned bulk pick, the stock position can be viewed and stock moved so that the bulk pick is performed as efficiently as possible.

Orders that need packing are grouped by issuing instructions to the warehouse staff to group the orders prior to shipment. This allows pallets to be made up.

Sales orders for the same ship-to address or distribution orders for the same ship-to site address can be grouped, forming one consolidated pack list. This can then be used to decide the packing of the order.

By setting control fields, you can choose whether the bulk pick is either shipped or issued as part of the bulk pick process, or issued as individual orders using standard system work order component issues and sales or distribution order shipment routines.

Bulk picking supports both two-phase and single-phase methods. At each step, the quantity picked, location, lot/serial, and reference can be manually modified.