Clever Shipping WMS Containers

Clever WMS Containers significantly drives efficiency in your Warehouse by allowing you to:

• Move multiple items with a single transaction
• Rotate inventory without doing lot or serial tracking
• Track what box, carton, pallet or stillage you have sent what item, to each customer in

Known in the USA as licence plating, you can automatically assign a unique container number to a quantity of single items or a group of items.  Alternatively, you can have your containers permanently marked with a unique number, popular for valuable metal stillages or jigs. In this instance, you can just select a manual numbered container type and scan that unique number to add items to it.

Simply put, a Clever WMS Container can be anything you move items in.

Often at receipt, items are scanned before being put into either a manual or automatically numbered container.  This is particularly effective for serial number tracked items as it turns every subsequent move from multiple scans into just one.

Any collection of items in a container can be put-away or moved simply by scanning or entering that container number and saying where you have put it. That means two scans and you’re done, for either a put-away or a movement, which is super-efficient and accurate.

This works because we have the principle that a container can only be in one bin in one location. By scanning the container number, the system automatically knows the from bin for all of the items in that container, it just needs to know the bin they are going to.

You can set if container tracking is to be used at the location, bin and item level. There will be items which you won’t want it to apply to, in this case simply disable container tracking on the item card.  Similarly, you might want to use container tracking on in your receipt bin and bulk bins, but not in your pick bins, this can be set at the bin level.

And yes, we have functions to add-to, take from and consolidate containers if you need to tidy up your bulk spaces.

A container enquiry allows you to see what the system believes is in a container currently and using the ledger entry record against that container, what has been in it and where it has been.

The inventory rotation works because we know when a container was last empty and can use that as the original date or receipt. That allows us to recommend on the movement worksheet that replenishment of your pick face comes from the bin with the oldest container inventory even if it's been moved several times in the meantime. It's not the full traceability you need for food, aerospace or pharmaceuticals but will satisfy for a lot of consumer goods or building product distributors for example.

It also supports movement of containers between locations, so for instance if you have a bulk or third-party location offsite, if you do the receipt on that location into a warehouse container, we can create a transfer order for the full container to replenish other locations (driven, as standard, by the rules on Stockkeeping Units) before using a single efficient scan out and subsequent scan in of the container number at each end.

And on outbound sales transactions we can pick to a container which allows you to know what items where on which pallet or in which box. This in mandatory for EDI ASN’s requested by lots of larger retailers (Amazon for instance) but smaller customers appreciate the convenience of the shipment note being listed by container, letting them go straight to the items they urgently need.

Clever WMS Containers is not an Extension on its own, but a library extension installed by other Clever Applications.  That because it introduces its own journals and adds additional fields to the item and warehouse journals.  Any inventory function within Business Central that moves inventory between bins needs to be aware of it.  Currently that is:

• Clever WMS Devices – Real time barcode scanning for any warehouse transaction
• Clever Shipping Agent Integration – API integration with your carrier to says what is in what box for customers declarations
• Clever EDI – Sending Advanced Shipping Notices electronically to your customer

 In the future

• Clever MES – For manufacturing output into and consumption from warehouse containers