Rolled and continuous products have some unique characteristics that are particularly troublesome from a warehousing perspective. In this post I am going to talk about some industry needs the way I see them from my perch as a WMS implementer.

What are Rolled Product and Continuous Products?

You encounter these products every day. Think wires, cables, hot or cold rolled metal sheets, fabrics and paper rolls. Some of the unique challenges that one faces while dealing with these products are:

1. The items are planned, valued and priced based on weight or length. In other words, weight or volume unit of measure is most naturally suited for planning, manufacturing, valuing on-hand inventory and invoicing needs. However the items are physically stored as discreet units in the warehouse.
2. No standard packs. Due to the uniqueness about their production methods you are more than likely to get variable lengths of the product in your inventory. The variable nature poses problems as you cannot have a standard order size and as a result, the warehouses will result in smaller cut quantities of wires, rolls and sheets that need to be consumed somehow.
3. It’s difficult to fulfill an order exactly as ordered. Some of these items such as metal sheets or wires require effort to cut and therefore fulfilling an order exactly as ordered is difficult. Over or under picking of orders is the norm rather than exception for these products.

Over the years Gaea Global has implemented Oracle WMS at companies such as primary metal and utilities where we have comprehensively addressed these needs. The good news: most of the product functionality is available in the product and very few customizations are needed to address the major warehousing needs.

Let’s look at some of the WMS best practices from an implementation perspective:

1. Weight or Volume as the primary UOM: Since the items are planned, valued and priced based on weight or length, the primary UOM needs to be weight or volume.  The 11.5.10 catch weight functionality is not your friend as catch weight implies that you keep a discreet UOM as primary and capture quantity in a secondary UOM for invoicing needs only.
2. Define each discreet unit as LPN: This implies that every roll or bobbin is an LPN. This way you can store the quantity in LPNs without the need to measure or enter quantity every time a pick is performed.
3. Maintain accurate weight/volume for LPNs: This means from production to storage the LPN (i.e. roll, bobbin, bale, etc) must have accurate weight. This means that you do not need to weigh or measure the volume during pick time. If you happen to cut the product, the weight or volume of the product in the LPN must be updated.
4. Full LPN Allocation: Full LPN allocation ensures that residual quantities in LPNs get allocated and consumed. The out of the box allocation may not be most optimal and customizations may be needed to strike the right balance between quantity picked and quantity picked above tolerance.
5. Capture over ship tolerance: This needs to be captured at the time of order entry or defaulted for each item. Over ship tolerance ensures that item ship quantity is controlled.
6. Configure Pick with no over pick or under pick tolerance: Certainly you do not want to enter exceptions every time picks over or under. As I mentioned earlier, over or under picking of orders is the norm rather than exception for these products. You do want your operators to pick and confirm products without keying exception code every time.

What WMS does not do well is to recognize that over picking is common in the warehouse for such products. Therefore the tasks created will be consistently lower than the actual ordered quantity.