Darcy Boerio | Schulz Consulting

What Is Wave Picking and How Can It Help Speed Up Sage 100 Shipping?

June 18, 2020 by Darcy Boerio

Wave picking is the process of grouping together multiple-orders so they can be selected and staged for shipping by one person efficiently. The software guides warehouse workers through a route ensuring there is no doubling back to pick a stray item from across the warehouse floor.

Within native Sage 100 you’re able to print picking sheets. These are printed one per order and won’t take your bin locations into consideration when listing which items to pick first.

Using ScanForce Advanced WMS you’re able to directly read ( and write back ) your existing Sage data. This allows the WMS solution to route your warehouse personnel in the fastest way possible so there is less wasted time wandering a large warehouse.

Frequently you may want to record the location of an item in multiple places within your warehouse. When inventory is received it may be placed into an inspection area. When it’s ready for sale it may go into a “regular” bin location and when it’s been picked and is getting ready for shipping it may go into a separate shipping bin location.

These multiple bin locations are created within Sage 100 with the use of DSD/ScanForce Multi-Bin which natively integrates with all of your WMS modules ( Sales Order, Purchase Order, Inventory).

There are two steps to wave picking. One creates a wave in your Sage 100 system. The second creates the wave within the scanner itself.

Remember, wave picking is centered around the concept of grouping multiple sales orders together to pick all orders at one time walking the warehouse in the most efficient method possible.

In the video below, the first step is creating the wave in Sage 100 under the ScanForce module.

You can create a wave for a particular customer if you like. This can be handy when you ship multiple orders to one customer.

ScanForce also provides a tool for order selection. Select by a customer, ranges of customers, or ship date.

To pick the wave you’ll go on to the scanner and let it direct you through the warehouse as you pick the orders.

ScanForce picking works with DSD/ScanForce multi-bin. This allows you to specify a location where items are going to be staged until they are packed and shipped.

Typically you’ll use a shipping bin for segregating orders that are being staged.

If you’re on a forklift, for example, and you’re not able to actually scan a barcode you could tap on the screen (can be disabled forcing users to actually scan the items).

Once the order is picked, you’ll send it over to Sage 100. This does a few things. The first thing is to update the ScanForce dashboards in the order status now that it’s in the process of being picked and it’ll move over to packaged and then shipped. It also updates the bin locations at the order level, so you know that it’s now in shipping and staged for eventual shipping.

Another option is to create a wave from the actual handheld rather than in Sage 100. On the device, in wave picking you can select “Create Wave”. This is helpful if you receive a stack of orders that you need to ship for the day. Simply scan the orders into the wave, and you’re ready to go.

Sage 100 Directed Picking for your Warehouse

June 4, 2020 by Darcy Boerio

Is your warehouse staff wasting time wandering the aisles of your warehouse picking items haphazardly? Could you increase productivity and speed up fulfillment if orders were picked in a more deliberate manner?

One solution to this is ScanForce Directed Picking for Sage 100, which is available for users of ScanForce WMS Advanced and Premium.

The concept of Directed Picking is to tell a user on their mobile device where to go within the warehouse to pick the goods and what to get. The device guides the user through the most efficient path based on item locations.

In this recording from ScanForce, join Steve Showalter as he walks you through the process.

This feature works with and without multi-bin. In the demo shown, Steve is referencing a bin location, so in a non multi-bin install this is going to look to the standard bin locations that are set up in Sage 100 inventory item maintenance.

How it works

This demonstration uses the DSD/ScanForce Multi-Bin which leverages the allocation methods back in the multi-bin solution, so it assigns a bin location based on a certain set of rules available within multi-bin.

This allocation can occur automatically at several points. It can also be done manually back at the order level, so what you’ll see is simply an emulation of the mobile screen as is available on iOS and Android devices.

For this video, you’ll see the picking transaction, however the Directed Picking side carries through to the one-step Sage 100 Sales Order shipping if you’re not doing a staging of a Sales Order.

When the user launches Sage 100 Sales Order Picking on the mobile device, ScanForce will prompt for the Sage 100 Sales Order number. From here, the user can scan the order from a picking sheet, key it in, or do a lookup that connects in real-time to the Sage 100 accounting system displaying all available orders.

When the order has been selected, the device will connect up real-time and grab the information from Sage 100, placing it locally on the device. The user can then go stage this order with Multi-Bin by indicating a bin location. Sage can be set to default to a shipping bin, a staging bin, or any bin you’d like.

ScanForce Directed Picking takes over, and the display shows the user where to go and what to get – sorted by bin location as well.

Even though an item may be the first line on the sales order, ScanForce Directed Picking will direct the user to go to a different bin first to get a closer item because it’s sorting by bin locations. This means they’re not going all over the warehouse back and forth again, it’s a Directed Pick.

This also works with lot and serialized inventory type items. ScanForce Directed Picking will direct the user where to get these lot/serial numbers.

The ScanForce Directed Picking concept is to tell the person where to go using the most efficient route possible so they can quickly and easily pick or ship that Sage Sales Order.

Watch: Sage Production Management Automation by ScanForce, with Sage’s Timothy Harfield

February 10, 2020 by Darcy Boerio

ScanForce recently made big news in the Sage 100cloud world when they hosted a webinar to introduce their new set of tools to automate Sage Production Management.

Since Sage Production Management is new to many in the Sage 100cloud community, having only been released in 2019, Timothy Harfield, head of Product Marketing for Sage 100cloud, made a guest appearance. He gave an overview of how Production Management gives manufacturers visibility into the entire production process and lets them increase agility by tracking costs in real-time.

A “Tremendous Accomplishment”

Harfield also commended ScanForce on their achievements in rapidly developing integrations to Production Management, including compatibility of DSD/ScanForce Multi-Bin, which he referred to as a “tremendous accomplishment”.

What’s so tremendous about it? While Production Management is written in a more modern architecture than its predecessor, making it easier for third party developers to integrate with, ScanForce faced the challenge of not having access to the source code due to arrangements that Sage made with the company who was contracted to write the module. While lack of access to source code made writing the integration that much more difficult, their in-house development team was able to make it happen thanks to ScanForce’s modern architecture.

“Choice is good”

Choice is good. It’s really important for growing businesses that they have the flexibility they need to remain agile in the face of constant change. And we don’t want to hobble our customers as they work to make the technology investment decisions that are right for them.

– Timothy Harfield, Product Marketing, Sage 100cloud

While Sage Production Management is a feature rich offering that will meet many of the core needs of manufacturers using Sage 100cloud, it does not inherently include multi-bin management or barcode scanning. Rather than restrict users to certain providers of these solutions, Sage encourages collaboration with partners like ScanForce to provide options for users to implement the right tool set. Harfield continues:

I’m thrilled by their accomplishment as a testament to the values of trust, customizability, and connectedness that we embed into everything we do in Sage 100cloud.

ScanForce Knows Manufacturing

After the opening remarks by Harfield, ScanForce’s Director of Sales, Steve Showalter, gave a little background on the company and their manufacturing suite, which includes Bill of Materials Production Entry, Work Order Automation, and of course the new Production Management Automation.

He also showed a slide showing a list of well-known brands whose products are made using ScanForce’s Manufacturing tools.

Demo Time!

After setting the stage, Showalter did a live demonstration of the ScanForce solution, including data capture on the mobile device and the flow of data into Sage 100cloud.

Ready to watch? See it all here!

ScanForce Announces Production Management Automation

January 22, 2020 by Darcy Boerio

The release of Sage Production Management made big headlines in the Sage 100 community in 2019. Replacing several legacy applications – Work Order and MRP – the new module is written in the “framework” essentially meaning that it has more modern technology that is consistent with much of the rest of Sage 100cloud.

Here’s a helpful reference for more about Production Management itself:

Sage 100 Work Order vs Production Management

Manufacturing is a big vertical for Sage 100, with many Sage 100 partners reporting an uptick in adoption of Sage 100 as a whole by manufacturers in 2019. For new Sage 100cloud adopters, this is a no-brainer. They won’t have an option to use the legacy WO and MRP.

But for existing Sage 100cloud customers, they need to decide when the time is right for them to switch over (they’ll all have to make the move eventually). Adoption by this group has been slow by all accounts, which is not uncommon when people are being asked to leave what they know for something new that hasn’t been on the market long enough to garner proven success. Naturally people want others to be the “guinea pigs” and identify holes in the solution that the publisher can repair before they jump into the fray.

One such hole was the lack of an integration to ScanForce’s mobile barcode scanning technology. Users of Work Order and MRP were previously able to use mobile barcode scanning devices by ScanForce to automate actions like capturing material issues and completions as well as Labor Tracking. Only after the release was ScanForce able to access the functionality in order to develop their integration to Production Management.

Another problem that needed to be resolved after the initial release was that it didn’t initially integrate with DSD/ScanForce Multi-Bin, which is included out-of-the box for free with every license of Sage 100cloud. So if you were using the free multi-bin tool that comes with Sage and you wanted to move to Production Management, you would need to adopt a different multi-bin tool or forego multi-bin functionality in the PM process.

Fortunately, both of these issues have been resolved! In December, 2019, ScanForce announced compatibility between Production Management and DSD/ScanForce Multi-Bin. And today they’ve announced the February 1 general availability of the integration of their barcode scanning technology with Production Management.

You can read more about the solution on the ScanForce blog and/or join them for a live webinar:

Keep an eye on Wayne’s blog as things develop – you know he’ll give you the scoop!

How to enable Sage 100 wave picking and wave receiving in your warehouse

August 28, 2019 by Darcy Boerio

Warehouses aren’t for storing inventory, they’re for moving inventory.

Efficient warehouses will find the fastest path to keep inventory flowing. There are a number of different strategies to accomplish this, and there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Some of the commonly used procedures include split picking, bin allocations for direct picking, zone picking, and of course, the topic of this article, which is wave picking/receiving.

Wave picking and receiving are processes that pre-determine the way you move throughout the warehouse to maximize productivity. Items for multiple orders are picked in one pass, minimizing pickers’ “footprints” and keeping inventory on the move.

Let’s break down the two sides to the wave concept. You may find that both are options that could streamline your operations, or perhaps just one or the other. Every warehouse is different.

Wave Receiving

Waves allow you to group multiple POs together to receive by item. For example, if you receive a large shipment that has multiple items for multiple POs, there’s no need to sort items by purchase order before recording receipts. Simply scan the items in, and they’ll be allocated to the appropriate PO.

Related and based on the wave receiving concept is ScanForce’s new Container Receipt Management (CRM) offering, which is the answer to efficiently receiving items from multiple POs that all arrive together unsorted in a single container. CRM allows you to receive items in a container while it’s still in transit, then verify contents once it arrives, as well as track container details such as container ID numbers and other shipment related info.

Wave Picking

For Picking, waves allow you to pick multiple orders at one time using the most efficient path through the warehouse. With wave picking, your picking order is sorted by bin location rather than SO. This lets you walk the warehouse ONE TIME, rather than duplicating efforts and making multiple trips to the same locations.

A simple analogy for wave picking involves going grocery shopping armed with a shopping list. If your list is in alphabetical order, you will end up going back and forth through aisles, hitting some aisles multiple times. You might go to the produce section for bananas, then over to the meat department for chicken, then back to product for grapes. And so on. Not very efficient!

Scanforce integrated to Sage 100cloud enableds improved wholesale, logistic, loading, shipment and processing within your warehouse

But if your list is sorted by aisle, and the aisles are sorted in location order on your list, you’ll achieve a seamless single path through the store and be on your way!

Read more on this concept here: A Warehouse Nightmare

Fully integrated with Sage 100 / Sage 100cloud

As with all ScanForce solutions, wave picking and receiving in ScanForce are seamlessly integrated with Sage 100, including Sage 100cloud Multi-Bin Basic if you have items in multiple bin locations. Information about quantities picked and received populate the inventory records in Sage for full visibility into whats been picked or received.

Want to learn more? Watch this 20-minute recorded webinar, and we’ll explain what wave picking/receiving is, and what types of warehouse operations can benefit from it. And we’ll show you how easy it is to implement in ScanForce and Sage 100.

Watch “Ride the Warehouse Wave: Wave Picking and Receiving for Sage 100

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