Are you dreaming about the perfect supply chain where processes integrate seamlessly to link demand with matching supply? Now is the automated and undisrupted supply chain just a sweet dream? Maybe you spend your nights sleepless twisting and turning and worrying about how your supply chain is doing, and think of the operation as a football game. From day to day you struggle to be organized enough to defeat the opposing side (the erratic customers with their volatile demand).

It is maybe unrealistic to think that your operation can be unattended, but if you don’t dream about achieving it you should probably change position… The question is how to get closer to achieving it.

Let’s use the vision of highly automated warehouse processes. When receiving products into a warehouse, you want to identify what is coming, match that with business rules, and make an (automatic) decision about how to handle it, where to put it, and if it needs to go through QA.

Basically you want as much information as possible to be known upfront – dimensions, packaging, origin, identifiers, descriptions, classifications etc. Provided that you can handle the data and make it available, it can trigger your defined business rules and direct available resources, pending orders and task priorities.

So the more qualified data you collect, the better you will do in creating the ‘unattended’ flow. Supply Chain Digest is right now running a series of webcasts on Retail Supply Chain Best Practices, and one of the sessions is highlighting how critical correct and timely ASN information is for a high-performing operation. And still many companies are sticking their head in the sand and fail to adopt this.

If you want to sleep better, then work with your customers and suppliers to (at least) get the basic information right. The less handling and checks you want to perform in the warehouse, the more data you need. For automating a cross-dock channel, you need specific item-level information like:

• Have we verified that we have all required product information so that we can cross-dock?
• Do we know the next destination for the package – if not, how do we get it?
• Are the specific contents in a package allocated to a specific customer order?
• Are there multiple products in a box/on a pallet that can be cross-docked together?
• Do we have a ‘bill of materials’ for each package that uniquely identifies the contents?

There is no shortcut. You need the systems that can capture, carry and pass on ‘live’ information about your products, orders and shipments. Without the right data (and ability to make use of it) you’re back in the eternal football game, wondering which side will win today!

Agree or disagree? Comment and share your thoughts on process automation!

 Print This Post