The order cycle time or lead time from order receipt to dispatch is continually shortening and there is increased pressure on the warehouse manager to coordinate all activities to ensure that product is dispatched on time and complete. Many operations these days take orders late in the evening and dispatch the same night for next day delivery.
Managers work backwards from the latest dispatch time orders to complete the processes to meet the deadlines, making labor and equipment available at the right time. This process has to be managed precisely and be aligned with other activities within the warehouse.
After order picking, the goods for a particular order need to be brought together and made ready for dispatch. This may involve added value activities, such as labelling, tagging, assembly, testing, and packing into cartons. Where production postponement is undertaken, these activities may be quite extensive.
The goods then need to be sorted to vehicle loads and placed in, or on to, unit loads ready for dispatch. This may be a conventional operation (eg loading into roll-cage pallets and then using a powered pallet truck to take the goods to the marshalling area) or it may be automated (eg using conveyor sortation and automatically loading tote bins on to dollies, ie wheeled platforms). In the case of goods being dispatched on pallets, then the whole pallet may be stretch-wrapped, or shrink-wrapped, so that the goods do not move during transit. The goods are then transported to the appropriate marshalling area, which will have been allocated based on the outgoing vehicle schedule. There may be one or more marshalling areas associated with each loading door. Particularly where large items are required for a customer order, the goods may in fact be brought together for a customer order for the first time directly in the marshalling area. The goods are then loaded on to the vehicle and secured.
If a customer plans to collect the goods, then the vehicle load will need to be assembled and held in the marshalling area, awaiting collection. Good co-ordination is necessary in such instances to avoid the load taking up valuable marshalling area space for longer than necessary.
In the case of temperature-controlled goods, it is important to consider how the dispatch activities are managed, particularly when loading vehicles that are compartmentalized and thus capable of transporting goods at different temperatures. For example, loading the vehicles at three different loading docks (eg at ambient, chill and frozen temperatures) may be very time-consuming, whilst loading at a single loading dock will require close control to ensure that the temperature chain is maintained.
In many operations receiving is carried out in the morning while picking and dispatch occur during the afternoon and evening as order cut off times continue to be stretched later into the day.
Depending on the method of picking, sufficient space should be made available at the loading bays to stage the loads and allow for checking method (whichever is applied) be it full-carton checks or random checks. If coordinated correctly, the picked orders should arrive at the loading bay in the sequence in which they will be delivered. That is, the last delivery on the vehicle will be the first order to be loaded.
Collecting vehicles should be assigned a bay closest to where the orders have been accumulated. Where vehicles are delivering multiple orders, a system needs to be in place to segregate these orders and make them easily identifiable to the loading team. This can be a simple handwritten pallet label or a barcode label. Companies with sufficient yard space and available trailers can load product directly into them and park them up, awaiting collection.
Where full pallet loads are dispatched it may be that pallets are pulled directly from the bulk or racked area and immediately loaded onto the vehicle. This minimizes the amount of double handling and requires precise coordination. Once the dispatch team is ready, vehicles can be called forward onto the dispatch bay. This can either be the driver of the load or a shunt driver who is loading trailers in readiness for collection by drivers returning from earlier deliveries.
As with the receiving process, the driver’s paperwork needs to be checked to ensure that he is collecting the correct load. The trailer should also be checked to ensure that it is fit for purpose, ie clean and watertight, doesn’t have any odours which could contaminate the product, is at the correct temperature if loading refrigerated product, and finally that the floor is damage free.
Where products are loose loaded onto a container or trailer, the use of telescopic boom conveyors will assist the loading process significantly eg. In a tyre company. Its advantages are safer working conditions, cleaner working area with better visibility, separation of forklifts and operators, improved ergonomics, no more rolling of the tyres etc.
