Wave Features
Wave planning lets you plan the picking and replenishment activities so that you have control over all workload areas of a warehouse. Organizing the picking activities by wave lets you:
• Spread the workload for picking activities across the entire business day.
• Start picking activities on time for carrier arrival at the dock.
If picking activities start too late, this wastes time for the carrier who waits at the dock.
This is especially crucial with the Hours of Services regulation. The U.S enacted this regulation in January 2004 and it requires that drivers account for their day and week time. This can result in cost increases for the trucking industry and the customer.
If picking activities start too early, this can result in too much stock in the staging area awaiting truck loading and a waste of warehouse inventory space.
• Streamline the picking operations by having a continuous throughput of stock across the warehouse. Streamlining operations lets you have better use of warehouse resources and avoid peaks.
• Spread the workload in aisles and shipping lanes based on carriers so that items are moved to the correct shipping lane for a particular carrier type.
• Save time and tasks by fulfilling order lines with full pallets or boxes that you can move directly to the dock, bypassing picking and other areas.
• Use waves interactively to initiate some tasks and release orders before one wave is complete while starting tasks for another wave.
• Manage throughput of large quantities by releasing orders in a wave incrementally or all at once.
• To complete orders faster, you can automatically release a wave when replenishment completes. See
here.
Using wave planning, you can:
• Organize the picking by waves.
• Configure waves by carrier route, customer (ship-to), due date, or profile.
• Start wave activities based on picking loads.
• Have stock ready to load when trucks arrive.
• Optimize docking selection based on various criteria.
• Merge order lines to shipping lane by carrier.
• Specify a maximum number of order lines at a time by shipping lanes.
• Re-allocate picking tasks to shipping lanes.
• Dedicate shipping lanes for particular carriers.