Good morning,
I would like to track the fullness of our warehouse bins. This can be as simple as someone looking at the bin and deciding its percentage full.
I see that in the Warehouse Bin Maintenance, I can set the “Wave Max Fill” and “Wave Percent Fillable” for a bin. But I don’t see these fields reference anywhere useful.
For example when I want to receive some materials in, I want to know if there is room in a bin to put the materials. Without physically going to look at the bin, I would like to have Epicor track the percent fullness of each bin. I would like to see this in maybe Quantity Adjust, and Inventory Transfer.
Has anyone else implemented tracking of bin fullness? How do you do it? Where do you indicate how full a bin is? Once you do, where do you see how full a bin is?
I also would like to do the same thing, I never even knew this functionality existed.
The only issue is that our products vary in UOM so I don’t think we will be able to use this functionality as “full” would have a different context for each part.
After re-reading the ERP Implementation and Users Guides, I think I have determined that those fields are not what I needed. From what I can tell, Epicor can’t track the fullness of a bin. I may look into adding a UD field, but it could be more trouble than it is worth.
If anyone else has any brilliant ideas about tracking how full a warehouse bin is, I would be happy to entertain them!
Warehouse Bin does have Size, or is that part of AMM, which then can be setup in Warehouse Bin Size Group. A Size Group can be setup with a L/W/H and Volume. As long as your part has the right dimensions, along with any pallets or boxing it may be using/strapped to, you should be able to do a calculation to determine fullness
I do see those dimension fields. However we aren’t looking for such an automated approach. Many of our materials are teeny tiny, so we don’t track physical size for all of our materials. I am working on adding a UD field to WhseBin. I will post back when/if I get it working.
Thank you!
Scott, thank you for letting us know! I will see what we can do here. We have rolls of material that have a length width and height, but we inventory them in linear feet.
@NateS - What would you gain with a UD field, vs LxWxH, and calculating volume? Are you thinking where small parts are .2 cu in per LxWxH, but stored bulk in a bin would be a lot smaller as they nest into each other? I guess a UD field as a multiplier for volume would help (aka 10% would be using .2 x 10% = .02 cu in per piece…
Are your bins all the same size, and the UD would be X pieces per bin?
Do you ever mix parts in bins (either using dividers or not)?
Is it full? great question… I believe that these fields are there for you to use as you need with BPMs and other customizations. I have not seen any base functionality included with these fields.
Other random thoughts:
Is my cerial box full? “Product sold by weight not by volume” comes to mind… The box may be “full” but not look full… Why didn’t they fill it? well, “Contents may have settled” is the excuse given.
Same goes for “Bins”. The bin might have as much as it can practically hold (by weight) but still have room (volume) left over. You can also have items that fill the space, but there is still enough unused weight available. So… you need to know what “full” means.
Exactly Tim, that is what we have here. We hang rolls in racks that have bins. Each bin can hold 3 full size rolls, but they can also hold half rolls or whatever other size roll. So really the only way to know is by how many rolls are in the rack, not linear feet in which we inventory them…
Our bins are simple carboard boxes on a shelf. Some are small, some are bigger. We put parts of all shapes and sizes in the bins. Since we don’t track the LWH of the parts in the bins, we can’t really rely on the volume calculation.
We have few enough bins that we can have someone look at each bin, make judgment call as to its fullness, and then record that in the new UD field as a percentage. This is mainly to avoid receiving all new parts into a bin that is already overfull. We are mainly interested in the fullness by volume. But, by allowing it to be a judgement call, someone could call a bin full when it is only half full of really heavy parts.
This will need to be maintained in an easy way, so I will likely have to develop a UBAQ and BPM to show all the bins and their fullness. That way a user can edit the fullness of all bins in a list, like they would in a spreadsheet. I will post back when I have a workable solution.
Oof, this is bringing back a lot of memories from engineering school…
My first thought is you’re never going to be able to calculate this out geometrically using Part dimensions; you have to consider void fractions and so many other variables… It’s a fool’s errand.
You said it yourself, it could be as simple as someone looking at the bin periodically and deciding how full it is. Or in Utah’s case looking at the “bin” and noting how many open slots there are for rolls.
If you want to take it further than that, and only if the business needs really justify the effort, you could consider some kind of regression analysis for each “important” part-bin of interest. That is, put varying quantities of the part in the bin and measure fullness (however you define it) as a function of part-qty where qty is measured in the same UOM as the Part uses in Epicor. And then pray for a good linear fit in the regression because if it’s not linear you’re out of luck. If it is linear you extract a “fullness coefficient” characteristic of the part-bin, and then write a bunch of code that fires for ever bin transaction where the combination of part transaction qty and the coefficient can be used to maintain an “estimated bin fullness percentage” UD field. That said, this is just a fun thought experiment; it’s still a fool’s errand…
First I would ask if you have multiple parts in a location?
Do you have a dedicated part to a location?
If no and then yes to those questions:
For me the way I would approach it is with the number01 field (or any number UD field) and see a OoH “max” for that part in that location.
Then it is a BAQ to calculate the % full. QOH in bin/ number01 field. Throw it in a dashboard.
All I think when it doesn’t work out systematically is IoT sensors to know when a bin has something in it and when it doesn’t. Won’t work for all product, but what doesn’t work with a sensor might work with a cheap camera and trained AI/ML model. Haven’t been able to do anything with the tech yet cause I don’t understand it, but it has to be possible.
@NateS
have you tried to give each UOM for each part a volume attribute ? then on Bin setting you can determine what volume percentage you want to set alerts or stop?
That is the problem. We don’t want to define the volume for our parts. In this particular case, we are talking about purchased materials like nuts and bolts that just go into a storage bin until they get issued to a job. If we decide to start tacking part size and volume I think we could use this.
I added a decimal field to WhseBin called Fullness. Once epicor support finished their process, I should be able to use that field to populate a fullness value for all bins. I will post back again once I have a solution worked out.
This worked out just like I had hoped! And for the first time I am actually excited about how easy it was in Kinetic.
First, I opened UD Column Maintenance, and noted the warning that tells me to have data model regenerated and app pool recycled. From there I choose the WhseBin table to add a new column to. I added a column in decimal format called Fullness. At first I couldn’t use this new column. The form said right there that the table WhseBin_UD was not in the database. But after getting support to regen and recycle twice, I could finally access my new column.
From there it was easy. I opened the Warehouse Bin form in Kinetic and then loaded my new column into the grid by personalizing the columns. Sure enough at the very bottom was my new field, Fullness_c.
Note, the system automatically added the _UD and _c to the table and fieldnames.
Now, when I run warehouse bin, I can see all the bins in a particular warehouse, and a decimal for their fullness value. 0.00 to 1.00. The field is not limited, so one could overstock a bin, and call it 1.5 or 150% full. You can also easily update the value of the new field right from the grid! I didn’t even have to use a UBAQ, write a bit of code, or setup any references or links. That was really nice.
I think this will work out perfectly for us. I will work on adding the new field to a few more forms to make it even more useful.