Getting orders out the door
A facility's shipping operation should be fast, efficient, and accurate. Streamline your operation to keep customers coming back for more.
By Staff -- Modern Materials Handling, 5/15/1999
No matter how much gets done correctly up until the shipping department, this is your last chance to make or break an order to a customer's satisfaction. Shipping is where any order can suddenly become incomplete, inaccurate, or ill-timed. In the worst scenario, an order could become all three. On the other hand, it could avoid any such fate.Making the latter happen is what planning your materials handling and information systems is all about.
However, emerging supply chain practices have raised the performance bar and require shipping solutions that you may not yet have in place or even considered.
The shipping process involves many steps that include proper packaging, weighing and cubing of packages, generation and application of labels to customer requirements, and parcel manifesting including determination of shipment charges.
Furthermore, packaging equipment ranging from carton erectors, palletizers, and stretch wrappers often figure in the leading solutions. The same is true of electronic scales and automatic data capture hardware such as bar code scanners and portable terminals.
And then there's the matter of software. Warehouse management systems (WMS) direct warehouse activities up to and including those in the shipping department. But now they are linking up with a powerful ally-transportation management systems.
Now, that's not a simple laundry list of hardware and software at your disposal. It's an arsenal capable of making your shipping department look good every day on every order.
It is easy to underestimate the importance of preparing the shipping department for whatever it is about to receive. It can also be dangerous to do so.
Take crossdocking, for example. In many ways, this is the most straightforward of the six emerging supply chain practices. Inventory, generally in full pallet loads, is received and either delivered directly to shipping or staged for a short period of time prior to shipment later that day or the next.
To prepare the shipping department for timely crossdocking requires quite a bit of information about receipts and orders. And that information must be coordinated with materials handling operations.
For instance, it must be known how much of which stock keeping units (SKUs) will be arriving at the warehouse and when. Electronic data interchange (EDI) is often used.
Having this information allows the warehouse to predetermine how it will allocate inventory for crossdocking. Then the actual time and dock door for each shipment of crossdocked inventory can be set (even in advance of inventory receipt), enabling the shipping department to prepare for its arrival.
Delivering inventory to shipping often involves lift truck drivers with radio frequency data communication terminals. This allows on-the-fly communication of which pallet loads need to be delivered to which dock door for shipment. Similarly, that same destination information can be used to direct and control guided vehicles or even conveyors and sortation systems that might be responsible for making the delivery to the staging area or dock door.
A typical step in the crossdocking process is generation of shipment labels often under the direction of a warehouse management system. If required, cubing, weighing, and manifesting can be part of the process too. Sometimes, these activities are linked to a transportation management system.
And as the final step, all critical information about the impending shipment can be sent by EDI to the destination before the trailer ever leaves the dock door.
An excellent example of efficient crossdocking is Panasonic's distribution center in Kent, Wash. Between 40% and 60% of receipts are crossdocked.
Upon receipt, cases are labeled with a bar code for internal sortation by conveyor directly to the designated shipping dock. All of these activities are under the control of a warehouse management system.
At that dock, a transportation management module of the WMS takes over. It shops for the best shipping rate for that inventory if no carrier is specified by the customer. If a carrier is specified, the transportation module simply rates it and prepares labels and related paperwork prior to shipment.
Bringing orders together
The shipping department is also critical to the efficiency of value-added service centers and flow-thru warehouses for one in the same reason-shipping is where orders come together.
In both cases, orders are assembled in shipping after having been processed at multiple points in the warehouse or distribution center. That means both materials handling systems and information about the orders being filled need to work seamlessly.
One scenario, which is quite similar to crossdocking operations, relies on bar codes to feed data to a conveyor system or a sortation loop that delivers seemingly unrelated items to designated locations for individual orders. Warehouse management systems often figure prominently in this coordination of inventory and information about it.
Pharmaceutical distributor Kinray boasts a shipping accuracy to retailers of 100% in no small part due to its use of bar codes and wireless terminals.
After orders are prepared for shipment, a fixed-position scanner reads the bar codes on each shipping carton as they travel down a conveyor for sortation to one of 13 shipping lanes. The information from the scanner is then relayed to the company's warehouse system. Then that software directs individual powered wheel diverters to sort each box into designated shipping lanes.
In another scenario, the back end of a warehouse system guides final packaging and order preparation. Two companies-Geotek and Von Holtzbrink-in two quite different industries-communications hardware and books-have created highly accurate shipping systems that meet their specific needs.
"Since we automated information handling in our shipping and order verification system, we've reduced our picking and packing time by 30%. Plus, our shipments are virtually error free," says Terry Dury, warehouse manager at mobile communications provider Geotek.
The key is a software package that manages Geotek's pack and parcel manifest needs. In addition, the serial number of each item shipped is captured for Geotek's records and for those of its distributors.
At Von Holtzbrink Publishing Services, cartons of picked books pass over an in-motion scale to ensure shipment accuracy. If a carton's weight varies by more than 3% or 0.75 lb (whichever is least), the carton is rejected before entering the shipping department and re-routed for additional work.
Cartons passing the weigh test are routed to dunnage and sealing lanes for final packaging to customer specifications. Before final sortation to Von Holtzbrink's docks, cartons are re-weighed to record the actual pack weight for the shipping manifest prior to loading on trailers.
At many operations, palletizers and stretch wrappers figure prominently in the shipping department. Palletizer throughput levels range from ones suited to the high volume required by beverage bottling to models that handle just a few cases a minute. Similarly, stretch wrappers come with various throughput capacities suited to different needs.
As the artwork on the final two pages of this article shows, there are two quite different ways to load over-the-road trucks in the shipping department-slug loading and extendible conveyors.
For high volume operations, slug loading equipment with a traversing platform system moves an entire truckload of inventory into the trailer as a single unit or slug. For somewhat lower volume operations, extendible conveyors deliver cases from shipping all the way into the trailer for manual unloading and stacking. Needless to say, lift trucks are also widely used, offering perhaps the greatest level of flexibility.
Now that you have read through this article and the others in this issue, you hopefully have a better idea of how to plan your operations from receiving to shipping to support today's leading supply chain practices.
Advantages of manifesting
* Fast and efficient shipment of packages
* Automatic determination of shipping costs from weight and destination code
* Documentation of shipping expenses
* Ability to review shipment data and research for shipment information
* Rate shopping between carriers
* Address labels, document labels, tracking bar-codes, COD tags, and other labels printed at shipping station
What a WMS can do for your shipping process
* Order consolidation & staging
* Trailer load sequence management
* Advanced shipment notification
* Order verification
* Inbound & outbound traffic management
* Production of:
Shipping check lists
Manifests
Bills of lading
Shipping labels
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