In today’s dynamic supply chain environment, efficient warehouse management is more important than ever. Oracle Warehouse Management (WMS) provides powerful capabilities to streamline operations, enhance visibility, and drive greater productivity across warehouse functions. While implementing Oracle WMS, we need to have a deep understanding of various warehousing processes and how Oracle WMS can fulfil these processes seamlessly.
This is the first in the blog series “Navigating Oracle WMS: Insights, Strategies, and Success” which presents a high level summary of warehousing processes from an Oracle WMS stand point. From receiving and putaway to picking, packing, and shipping, this overview sets the foundation for deeper discussions on how Oracle WMS optimizes each stage of warehouse operations. Stay tuned as we continue to explore each process in detail in the upcoming posts.
Warehousing is essential in today’s complex and dynamic supply chain and key to achieve customer satisfaction. Efficient warehousing processes are key to effective logistics and supply chain management. They enable quick, accurate fulfilment of customer orders, ensuring better inventory control and space utilization. This leads to reduced costs in storage and transportation. Understanding these processes is key in implementing any WMS applications.
Warehousing processes can be broadly classified into:
- Receiving process (Dock to Stock)
- Storage processes (Manage Inventory)
- Shipping processes (Stock to Ship)
- Cross docking (Dock to Ship)
Receiving or Dock to storage process is one of the critical steps in warehousing. This involves receiving and processing the incoming shipments into the warehouse. Receiving process can be further classified into:
- Gate to Dock: Covers all activities from the time a shipment is reported at the gate pick up or delivery till the shipment is ready to be unloaded / loaded at the dock. This includes the following activities:
**- Gate operations: Managing the vehicles reported at the warehouse gate for pick up & delivery, capturing the information, verifying / validating the documents and managing gate in & gate out information.
- Yard Operations: Managing the yard activities such as allocating a yard location, within yard movements and tracking vehicles with in the yard.
- Dock operations: Scheduling & managing dock appointments, dock door assignments, managing dock door check & check out and monitoring the dock door activities such as loading or unloading.
- Dock to Stage: Includes all activities from the time the shipment / vehicle is placed at the dock door till goods are unloaded into staging area. This includes:
- Pre – Receiving: Includes receiving detailed information about the shipment (ASN) and arranging the pallets, printing labels, storage space planning and arranging the MHE required for receiving.
- Receiving: It is the process of verifying & validating the documents, visual inspection of vehicle, unloading the goods into staging area and counting the goods and palletizing if needed.
- Stage to Stock: Covers all activities involved in moving the goods from staging to storage to other appropriate locations within the warehouse. This involves:
- Quality Check / Verification: Process of checking the quality of incoming goods against the pre defined standard / check list. Post the quality check, goods can be classified as good or QC reject and moved to appropriate storage locations.
- Inbound Sorting: This includes organizing and sorting the items before they moved to final storage location.
- Value added services: Additional activities such as labelling, kitting / de-kitting etc to be performed on incoming material before they moved into storage location.
- Putaway: It is the process of moving the good to the final storage location based on put away rules / guidelines or strategies.
Storage processes include all activities to ensure that inventory is stored safely and systematically and perform activities to maintain inventory accuracy and inventory available for efficient picking operations. This includes the following activities.
- Counting: Counting ensure accurate reporting of inventory and carry out action / -investigation in case of any inventory discrepancies are observed.
- Manage stock: All inventory management activities that includes:
- Palletize / depalletize goods in the storage locations.
- Stock adjustments in case of any discrepancies in inventory.
- Stock movements from one location to other within a warehouse.
- Value added services: Additional activities such as labelling, kitting / de-kitting etc to be performed on goods in storage location before they are picked for order fulfilment.
- Replenish: Restocking inventory from reserve or bulk location to active of pick locations to ensure that the goods are available at the pick locations to meet order fulfilment needs.
Stock to ship process is one of the very critical process in warehousing. This involves receiving & processing shipping orders, picking, packing & shipping the goods to customers efficiently and timely. Shipping process can be further classified into:
- Stock to Stage: Covers all activities from the time an order is received for delivery till the shipment is picked and ready to be dispatched. This includes the following activities:
- Order processing: Covers receiving orders, processing, allocating the stock & processing the order for picking operations.
- Pick: Picking the goods from storage locations based on customer requirements for further operations.
- Packing the picked goods.
- Value added services: Additional activities such as labelling, kitting / de-kitting etc to be performed on goods that are picked and before shipped to customer for order fulfilment.
- Stage to Dock: Includes all activities from the time the picked goods are moved from staging location to shipping docks for shipping. This involves sorting, packing & auditing.This includes the following activities:
- Outbound sorting: Consolidating the goods in staging area based on pre-defined rules such as order, customer, shipment method, priority, route etc.
- Audit: Final check to ensure correct items are picked in correct quantity.
- Packing the contents after audit & verification.
- Dock to Ship: Final process in shipping where packed goods are loaded into the truck and shipped out of the warehouse. This includes the following activities:
- Shipping: Activities include loading the goods into the truck, printing shipping documents and final verification.
- Gate Operation: Verification of documents and truck at the gate before the truck leaves the warehouse.
Cross docking is the process where goods from inbound shipment are transferred to shipping area with minimal or no storage. This helps in streamlining the flow of goods and improves turn around time. Cross docking process can be further classified into:
- Dock to Stage: Moving the material from inbound dock location to shipping stage location.
- Stage to Dock: Includes all activities from the time the picked goods are moved from staging location to shipping docks for shipping. This involves sorting, packing & auditing.
- Dock to Ship: Final process in shipping where packed goods are loaded into the truck and shipped out of the warehouse.