What is a wave?

Why do I need work records? What happens when you “release to warehouse”?

Why I end up with having a shipment, but no work to perform in my warehouse?

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In this post I shared how I define these terms.

License plate and inventory status

Two inventory dimensions that you will meet when you activate advanced warehouse management functionalities and they are mandatory to use. Don’t panic if you can’t place these two in your operations because, you can use them with default or application generated values as well.

Location directive

As the name describes, they direct you to locations. But how? According to your setups at Warehouse management/Setup/Location directives. Simply, with setups that will be defined in the future posts, they lead mobile device users to proper locations.

Work

Work records are the core of advanced warehouse management and they basically show mobile users’ path during warehouse processes.

Work template

Works are created based on work templates. Simply, you can have different picking structures for different customer accounts. You can do it by adding queries to your work templates to achieve that. Or you might want to assign your works to different work pools, work templates will take you there, too.

Work pools

A way to group your works, according to how they differ for you.

Shipment

These are your deliveries, and they can be either inbound or outbound. Shipments are more an issue of Transportation Management module but, you don’t have to be deeply using Transportation Management functionalities to be able to use advanced warehouse management operations.

Wave

Wave is where it all starts for outbound work. And it is used only, for outbound work. Let’s say your users will release orders to warehouses but, a schedule to create works every 4 hours is the way you do it. Then wave is here to serve you. So it is a functionality that lets you collect releases until you process or the application processes the waves as you want. If you don’t need such a functionality, then you still must define a template per warehouse. But you can set them up for not requiring your action to create works. Then, when a wave is created it will also be processed at the same time. So, creating a wave will mean creating the work for your environment.

Load

Loads are combinations of merchandises. One shipment can include one or more loads. Also one load can include one or more shipments and loads are used for both inbound and outbound operations.

For inbound operations, they can be created by the user or the application, as we will “experience how” in future posts. For outbound operations, loads are created when wave is processed.

Release to warehouse

This term can be a little confusing since it can be configured to perform different processes according to your setups. But what it does actually is:

• Creating a shipment, no matter what
• Searching for a wave template, and if found: Performing operations configured on wave template such as: Creating a wave or assigning to an existing one; Also processing the wave as configured on the template.

You can release only outbound records to warehouse. When you release a transfer order or sales order, application will create one or more shipments according to your records and setups. For example, if you have different delivery dates for 2 different sales orders, then you will end up with having two separate shipments for these two lines.