Wave Planning
QAD Warehousing provides the ability to group several different sales and distribution orders and coordinate and manage the warehouse replenishment, picking, and movement activities for them. This process is called wave planning. The following topics describe how wave planning works.
OverviewDiscusses the principles behind wave planning and illustrates some of the features of wave planning.
Key ConceptsDescribes the relationship between warehouse areas and stock movement among them, and outlines how to use waves in warehouses, replenishment techniques, warehouse flow, and wave features, programs, selection, and replenishment.
Setting Up Wave PlanningLists the steps required to set up for wave planning and outlines how to complete them.
Selecting Orders and Creating the WaveDiscusses how to use Wave Selection (4.15.3) to create a wave.
Replenishing a WaveDescribes how to replenish a wave and outlines the steps of wave replenishment and the results of the replenishment.
Releasing a WaveDescribes how to release a wave, how the system deals with a released wave, and the customizable release options for a wave.
Manually Managing Release GroupsExplains how to manage release groups manually when a wave is released.
Deleting Order Lines on a WaveDescribes two different ways to delete order lines on a wave.
Initializing Orders in a WaveExplains how waves can be used to initialize open orders.
Closing the WaveDescribes how to close a wave and view open or closed waves.
Deleting/Archiving Closed WavesExplains how to use Closed Wave Delete/Archive (4.15.23) to delete or archive data for waves.
Viewing Wave InformationLists and describes wave reports and inquiries and their menu numbers, and describes how to monitor order and wave status.
Overview
Wave planning involves the same principles as lean distribution; that is, the objective is to plan activities in a warehouse and eliminate inefficiencies and waste. Like kanban systems or other just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing principles that streamline the replenishment process, wave planning pulls items to areas—such as the picking area— just before they are needed.
Wave planning features let you create and release a wave. A wave is a collection of either sales orders (SO) or distribution orders (DO) or both. Sales orders include scheduled orders and sales orders for configured kits. Warehouse staff can pick for the collection of orders together at a certain point in time. For example, if you know that a carrier arrives at 4:00 pm, you can create a wave for all orders linked to the carrier.
Note: You specify carriers in the Ship Via field on sales order or distribution order trailers.
Because you can see the orders in the wave and the quantities required for each order, you can foresee tasks and the workload; this lets you plan accordingly. Based on the workload and the available capacity, you can determine when to start the wave to ensure that warehouse staff pick, pack, and prepare the orders for shipping when the carrier arrives at the warehouse.
The system combines orders for the same customer ship-to address on the same pre-shipper, even when the carriers are different. Warehouse functions, however, put the orders for different carriers on different pre‑shippers. You can also maintain carriers at the line level in the system using SO Warehouse Data Maintenance (4.13.3) for sales orders and DO Warehouse Data Maintenance (4.13.6) for distribution orders.