Just Thinking out loud…
Imagine if your stockroom had Electronic Shelf Labels for all parts
Imagine if instead of a PRICE, this displayed the current demand quantity and current qty on hand
Imagine if the blinking LED started blinking when this part was in the material PICK queue.
Imagine if the blinking red “sale” instead said “incoming” for parts where there is a PO Arriving today.
Imagine if when doing Cycle Counts, the quantity on hand value disappeared forcing them to count the parts, but also started the blinking red light to make the part easier to find.
Just thinking out loud…
All of this is possible with Automation Studio (and some labels). We have built a POC recipe. Would this be something that people are interested in?
Ohhhh!!! Pretty blinking lights!
Seriously though, I am loving this idea!
Lightning Pick - The Leader in Pick to Light, Put Walls and Picking Carts
We use this in our plant. Not integrated with Epicor though.
That is very cool! I’ve not seen that having never been in a heavy distribution/fulfillment process.
Right well Epicor apparently knows nobody doing fullfillment or distribution either because I asked my CAM and the regional manager and they said they know nobody shipping one order to thousands of ship-tos… as distribution and fulfillment usually requires.
Literally said they only know that people use EDI… Then proceeded to ask me if I wanted to buy EDI.
@timshuwy We can’t really use something like this except in a very small scale, but I very much like the overall idea/concept.
We do this among many other things. One of our customers is a large store with thousands of locations throughout the country and we fulfil for them all the time. One time shipto’s for the win!
… Can we chat?
We tried to DMT them into one time ship-to, but it took an hour and a half to do 10,000 lines…
Are you doing something different?
well we don’t do 10K at a time… but just being patient i think is the only thing we can do.
Okay so you use DMT as well? Or did you write a function or command line DMT?
Yes all the above, depends on the source of the order. But we can do any of those. We haven’t had a 10K ShipTo order though its usually a few handfuls at a time.
We have multiple products… Kinetic can do distribution, but Kinetics strong suit is Manufacturing. and yes, I know of several companies that use Kinetic for distribution AND manufacturing. They make stuff in one site, then have several DCs where they actually ship product from.
We also have Prophet 21 and Eclipse, which are very strong on the Distribution side, but not as strong on the manufacturing side (they focus on purchased parts, and light assembly). We have many customers who do distribution with these products.
Interesting, we had another customer who used RELEASES, but they had separate ship-to addresses pre defined. To create the multiple shipments, they built up the data from a customer supplied spreadsheet with 100s of releases, and then pasted this data into the release list on the order. Then when they generated their shipments, they would get a separate packslip for each address.
One of my biggest challenges is that it seems Epicor would do us better for transforming raw material into stuff, whether ETO, MTO, or MTS; or for buying containers and shipping eaches, to one or many customers.
But we BUY thousands of components, and combine them many ways into hundreds of assemblies (ETI, MTO and MTS), and some of those components we ALSO manufacture from raw material as well as buy them.
Then, we ship to thousands of individual locations, either our several hundred distributors or drop-shipped to their customers.
So, there’s a buttload of picking, both of components for assembly, finished good for shipping, and components for shipping.
We’ve solved a lot of things but picking remains a huge quality challenge; and I could see this solution combined with EKW/EMWW being a really awesome. setup.
Tim, thanks for getting back to me on this. Yeah, they love Epicor’s manufacturing strengths and fulfillment/distribution was not always a big part of their business, but it has grown to the point where it is something to consider when looking at an ERP system.
When you say, “Kinetic can do distribution,” what do you mean? Would you be able to put us in touch with some of those companies that are using it for distribution and manufacturing Tim?
I had so much trouble finding these companies at insights. It would be EXTREMELY helpful to be able to see how others are handling distribution to thousands of ship tos.
I see Jose is using “patience,” which might be what we have to do… Today we are shipping everything in excel sheets and then creating one shipment in epicor and then invoicing it, crediting it, then creating a miscellaneous invoice to match the shipments… You can imagine how that reconciliation goes at month end every month.
do you have the multi-site module (ie… multi-plant)?
Companies that have Distribution Centers typically will setup a DC SITE, and set minimums of inventory at that site. Then when creating sales orders, they sell from that site. When the minimum is hit, then there is a replenishment TRANSFER order created to move parts from the main manufacturing (or another DC) to the DC that is short. This can be automatic with MRP if you have setup the DC correctly (ie… set all the parts as TRANSFER parts. There are cases where companies have setup a primary MFG site, a primary DC site (all parts are transferred to/from here), and then multiple regional DCs. MRP will suggest movement the inventory as required.
Tim, that’s a good idea. The thing is we are doing fulfillment for other companies with thousands of locations… Think Home Depot or someone like that for an example. I wouldn’t want to set up a site for each customer we service, right?
well, the only reason to create a separate site for each home depot is if you actually control the inventory for each one. but typically, you would need to create sales orders for each home depot with billable shipments.