We are going to talk about one of the use cases that Hedyla's solution covers, how Business Intelligence can help to optimize articles location and detect problems.
Rotation in Warehouses
References in a warehouse are usually distributed in multiple zones (e.g, A,B and C) depending on the time they are supposed to stay in the facilities (the so-called rotation). Items that have a high rotation must be stored near the docks, while the ones that remain for days are stored in not so close positions, to speed up operations.
The rotation of a reference is usually determined by a person using their experience, the historic from the WMS, or the expected shipment time, if available. However, people make mistakes, the historic does not usually represent the future, and shipment times may change. This produces that articles are placed in wrong warehouse zones, producing two kind of effects, detailed below.
Effects of Bad Article Positioning
When an article that is expected to be rotating very frequently has actually a low rotation:
The article is placed near the docks, as it is expected to be shipped very often, but it remains for days there; therefore, it is occupying a place that could be used for articles with real high-rotation. Such articles with real high-rotation are placed therefore in a further location, worsening efficiency.
When an article that is expected to have low-rotation has actually a high-rotation:
The article is placed far from the docks, and the pickers must travel a much longer distance, and spend much more time to pick the items, resulting in worse efficiency. los pickers tienen que recorrer una distancia mucho mayor, y por lo tanto necesitan más tiempo para realizar el picking, resultando en una peor eficiencia.
Hedyla's solution
Optimizing Rotation with Hedyla
The Hedyla Cloud platform includes Rotation Maps and metrics, with two different, but equally important goals:
Detect anomalies in the current distribution of references, so if an article has been in the warehouse for more than it should be according to its current rotation classification, a warning is displayed, so the warehouse managers can act accordingly and move such article to a better place. It’s very usual to have articles that have been days without moving, near the dock, without anybody noticing.
Avisar cuando un artículo se coloca en una zona de rotación que, de acuerdo a nuestros análisis, no es el mejor. Por ejemplo, puede suceder que el SGA decida colocar crema solar cerca de los muelles porque, de media, tiene una alta rotación pero, en invierno, la rotación de las cremas es muy baja, por lo que debería ser clasificada como de baja rotación. Esto permite una planificación futura mucho mejor.
With our warehouse solution, the place where items are placed can be optimized to highly reduce the anomalies and improve productivity, not only via BI dashboards that give this useful information, but also with connection to your WMS to automate decisions and, therefore, avoiding that a human has to create orders to move articles or decide the rotation.
Co-Founder & Director of Engineering at Hedyla
Software & Computer Engineer with strong experience in innovative projects. Msc in Big Data and Artificial Intelligence. Constantly learning new languages and tools.
Ismael really enjoys attending hackathons, reading science books and running.
