SiMS/Inner Harbor Solutions - Waving Solution
What is Waving Solution? Waving Solution is a too developed by Inner Harbor Solutions, a SiMS partner,l that plugs into your Warehouse Management System utilizing a complex mathematical process to examine a large pool of orders assembling waves with common items. The result is a significant reduction in picking labor without adversely impacting other work centers. This solution can increase picking capacity without adding people or motorized equipment.
Who needs "Waving Solution"? Enterprises engaged in weekly store level replenishment for large retailers where the number of stores exceeds forward pick area capacity necessitating dividing the orders into multiple manageable waves.
How does this process work? Large groups of pick tickets are analyzed establishing groups with SKU commonality.
Typically, what is the impact?
- Reduction of batch picks by 25% to 40%.
- By reducing the number of picks both labor and equipment, (order pickers, scanning devices), are reduced.
- Where the put away/picking operations dictate the overall capacity of the facility, overall capacity can be increased.
What makes this process unique? Waving tools provided by Warehouse Management System vendors provide for the grouping of orders by carrier, type customer, purchase order and so on while shifting the responsibility of detecting the SKU commonality that can reduce labor to the waving analyst/manager. Waving Solution "looks" at the entire population of open pick tickets at the item level grouping waves not only by order commonality but also item commonality.
Does Waving Solution require the modification of my WMS? No. Waving Solution downloads data from your Warehouse Management System to a desktop computer. The waving analyst works with your data and the Waving Solution on his desktop creating waves that minimize the picking labor. Waving Solution then passes a recommended wave id back to the Warehouse Management System via an unused "user field". See Case Study
In this example 1,680 orders consisting of 315 items were waved using the single step waving process provided in WMS, (shown in blue), and re-waved using the 2-step process in Waving Solution, (shown in red). The traditional method placed some items in 11 of the 14 waves. Waving Solution's "Item Commonality Processor" restricted over half of the items to one pick and only 4 items were picked 3 times, resulting in a 66% reduction in picks, (452 versus 1,342).