Manually scanning labels just to run WMS closedown.

Challenge

Many times in organizations there is a disconnect on what the business needs, and what the systems can support. Due to lack of capabilities, backlog in development for changes, or what was billed as a “temporary process” has started to grow roots. In some of those cases there ends up being additional labor needed to basically fill in that gap on what one system expects and the other can provide. This is obviously frustrating where really the systems should support the operation and not the other way around.

There are many examples of this, but the one I like to go back to is from a long time ago to the time of green screen WMS’s and fax machines. There was a distribution system that needed to support sending a large volume of work to a 3rd party merge facility for last mile shipping. In that system it required containerization on each job that would become a separate ‘outbound shipment’ to the WMS. In order to do this and satisfy the system requirement an operator was given a box of jobs, a roll of pre-printed labels and a terminal to scan each job into a sticker and throw in an outbound box. At the end of the night each of these counted as a separate outbound box and increased the system shutdown time.

Approach

To solve this, I built an automation that looked into the database, grouped all of the work and then, using a virtual terminal, “scanned” to a single virtual outbound box by customer. This solution had the following benefits:

Result

• Freed up the FTE and shipping terminal to go back to actual work.
• Reduced system shutdown time by 80%
• Stopped wasting physical labels for no practical purpose.

Regardless of the age of this example, and how out of date the tools are now, the principles remain the same. Systems should work together, but that’s not always realistic and failing that there are even more tools now to help fill in those gaps even if “temporarily”.