The maintains and tracks shipment (ASN - Advanced Ship Notice) details from various sources. This provides a warehouse visibility to the Expected Time of Arrival (ETA). The has the ability to track shipment at all points in the supply chain. This enhanced visibility to shipment in the is used to prepare dock doors for receiving.
A shipment or inbound order contains item information and the expected quantity. There are situations when a shipment or inbound order contains additional details, such as case or pallet with LPN, lot numbers and serial numbers.
A carton can have SKU labels or a case with LPN label associated. These labels are generated at the origin warehouse or through the web through collaboration software. The pre-printed labels are industry practices employed to standardize inventory. It improves inventory accuracy and reduces labor costs. However, the allows for the manual creation of shipment when the information is not available electronically.
Once a shipment has been marked as shipped but before it has left the warehouse, a shipment can be unshipped and placed back into the status it was previously in before the shipment was marked as shipped.
The Dock Scheduling functionality of the enables you to manage all dock locations in a warehouse for receiving inbound shipments and shipping outbound shipments. The dock scheduling rules enables the user to specify number of days in advance to take a dock appointment.
The enables you to associate a dock schedule with a shipment or load. If scheduling is done for a shipment, the provides complete visibility into the shipment volume, weight, number of cartons available, and pallet information. Based on the Productivity Metrics (SAM definition), the duration of the appointment is also suggested.
Dock scheduling is based on the warehouse calendar associated with a dock and considers all working days and holidays, and shifts that are valid for receiving or shipping operations. Each dock can have its own calendar and shifts specified when they are available. You may also exclude certain docks from the scheduling process. For example, a warehouse may allocate one dock for UPS fluid loading, which may require one full day. In this case, dock appointment is not required for UPS fluid loading.
Each appointment is assigned a unique reference number. The time slot assigned for each appointment may vary based on the shipment size. For example, the duration for one appointment could be for 30 minutes and another appointment could vary between 45 minutes to 1 hour. Appointments can be changed to a future date in case the delivery fails. The creates alerts for such missed deliveries or pickups to ensure that new appointments are created. The also enables the cancellation of appointments that are already taken.
Due to additional resource constraints, a warehouse may not want to take more than a certain number of appointments at a given time. For example, if 20 docks are available for taking appointments, a warehouse may not want to schedule all 20 docks from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM, as it may not be possible for a warehouse to unload all 20 trucks at the same time.
Appointments can be taken only for the number of days specified in advance.