E-WMS

Introduction to WMS Location Types

WMS documentation

Introduction

This document describes the purpose of WMS Location Types.

Description

WMS Location Types were introduced in product update 402, for better support of SKU Management in combination with WMS Replenishment and Directed Put Away (DPA). Location types are designed to maintain location preferences for Replenishment and DPA for a whole range of locations at once. Location types are most efficient when replenishing based on order requirements and not having fixed pick locations per item, and when using stock on bulk locations to replenish sales units stock on picking locations.

The benefits of using location types are:

you are able to maintain preferences for product storage for a group of locations at once, instead of having to configure this per separate location
you are able to define replenishment requirements per item per group of locations, instead of having to maintain these per item for each separate location
you are able to define (for WMS picking advice) that for specific locations, breaking up SKU's is not allowed (despite the SKU itself may allow that)
you are able to report SKU transactions and SKU stock based on selection of location types

A location type has following general property types:

properties and preferences for storage of SKU's, either for replenishment or used in directed put away (DPA)
preferences and rules for generic storage of items (replenishment), both SKU's and sales units
preferences for other processes, like generating picking advice

Location types could be defined, based on following arguments:

bulk, pick, receipt bay or other generic location types
exclude location ranges as target locations for directed put away
limit storage to just one unit type (pallets, boxes, sales units), or just one specific SKU type ("Euro pallets").
storage limitations based on single item, batch or batch end date
not allowing breaking up of SKU's, based on the location properties, even when the SKU type would allow breaking up

Once location types are defined, they have to be linked to Globe warehouse locations and can also be linked to items to configure replenishment requirements per item per location type. Maintenance of Globe warehouse locations can be done the regular way (menu Inventory, Warehouse management, Warehouses). Maintenance of item requirements for replenishment can be done in new menu WMS, Setup, Location types, Items per location type.

These menu's are available from product update 402, when you license contains WMS Replenishment or WMS SKU Management.

Linking a location type to a warehouse location is not mandatory, location types are only used to link preferences to a range of locations, not to exclude other locations.

At the moment, there are still some technical restrictions in using location types for WMS Replenishment. Not all properties of a location type are applied yet in product update 402 and higher, and location types can only efficiently be used when replenishing based on order requirements (and not on minimum/maximum levels per location).

Functional

The functional maintenance of locations types is described in document WMS Location Types: maintenance. Once location types are created, you will have to link warehouse locations and items to location types.

Restrictions

The rules that can be configured when using location types, are not all implemented yet. Please see document Directed Put Away (DPA) section supported scenario's for more details.

WMS location types or WMS item locations?

For WMS Replenishment, WMS Item Locations (in menu WMS, Setup, Item locations) were already used to configure stock levels per location per item.

Using location types for WMS Replenishment will work only optimal, when you are using replenishment based on order requirements. When using Replenishment based on fixed minimum and maximum levels (per location), then WMS Item Locations (not: location types) will work more efficient. This is because in item locations, the maximum level is set for each location and item separately, allowing more than one specific location for the same item. In location types, the maximum level configured will be applied to to the first free location linked to the location type and not to a specific location. For example, when the maximum is set to 100, and the order requirement is 250, than 3 locations will be used to replenish this item, because 100 is the maximum that will fit on any location linked to this location type and item.

It is still possible to maintain item replenishment requirements in WMS, Setup, Item locations but without the extra preferences available in 'items per location type'. Also, it is possible to maintain item requirements first on location type level, and next on location level, to set more specific minimum and maximum stock levels per location. Minimum/maximum stock levels defined per item per location, overrule minimum/maximum requirements configured per item per location type.