CHALLENGE:
This revolves around a process manufacturer of quality wood finishes and supplies. They have approximately 60 users on their system. Logistically, there is one central processing facility with 3 regional warehouse locations. Client needed a way to automate their material movement documents triggered at order entry time to shorten administrative process lead-times.
Specifically, they wanted to generate Pick Tickets by sales order for each warehouse location displaying internal item key numbers and descriptions; but, also their
Customer’s unique SKU identifier(s). The pick ticket also has to show expected on-hand quantities for each item per bin location.
Next they needed to generate Bill-of-Ladings for the fulfilled pick tickets grouping multiple orders together for fulfilled picking tickets by location and product/material classifications.
They process around 400-500 orders per day and needed to automate the process of generating and distributing these documents with as little employee intervention as possible. Previously multi-part pre-printed sales order forms were used which when printed, had to be burst, separated and the Pick Ticket copies couriered over to each respective warehouse location for fulfillment. Once pulled and readied, Bills of lading were hand-typed for delivery to the central processing facility or directly to the customer.
SOLUTION:
With Liaison Messenger it was decided to eliminate the multi-part preprinted sales order form and to simply use a blank paper laser form for cost savings. The following solution was then easily configured in about an hour.
Ply 1 of the Sales Order would get printed to the Customer Service laser printer in the main office on blank paper. Messenger would print the lines and borders using the OEM layout from the Messenger Sales Order forms library.
Ply 2 would be used as the Pick Ticket. From Messenger’s form template library the standard Pick Ticket template was selected. Using the built-in forms design tool; the user modified the form by adding their customer’s SKU number adjacent to their internal item key in the description column. The locations on-hand quantity would also print directly from the inventory table for real-time accuracy.
Next they selected the filtered Send to Location option. This powerful feature allows them to setup a pivot table for the preferred method of distribution for the individual location(s). In this case all locations were set to print remotely over Citrix; however, they could also change any location to send the pick tickets via fax or email in a PDF file independent of the other locations if they so desired.
Finally, ply 3 of the sales order was designated as the File copy using the OEM layout. To save paper costs, they enabled the Archive Copy to Disk routing option. Here they were able to specify a static directory for the archived sales order and store the archived file in an Adobe PDF format.
In summary, upon a user entering and saving an order in the system, Messenger automatically detects the presence of the unprinted sales order(s), prints the Sales copy to the printer in Customer Service, prints a Pick Ticket directly to the remote printer(s) for each respective location, archives a copy of the order to disk in a PDF format and then updates the order in the Sales Order module to show as printed.
The Sales Order process was improved immediately. With Messenger, they were able to:
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Eliminate the purchase of 120,000 3 part pre-printed forms a year
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Remove 2 days from the manual process of batch printing, separation, and distribution of those Pick Tickets
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Eliminate the couriering cost of those Pick Tickets to the remote locations
The Bill of Lading was quite easy to implement, under the Shipping Documents option, ply 1 was configured for the Bill of Lading, ply 2 was set as the Packing Slip. Using a filter to identify the readied orders for shipment to the central processing facility, users simply enter the order number range via Messenger Client and the Bill of Lading is summarized by product classifications and automatically printed for the fulfilled sales orders. Since the Bill of Lading requires a signature, the preprinted form template was used and then printed to the remote dot-matrix printer at each location. This simple feature eliminated the hand typing of 20,000 Bill of Lading every 6 months. A Packing Slip is then generated, suppressing any pricing information, to be included with the cartons/palettes.
Not mentioned in the case study was the enabling of Messenger to fax Purchase Orders to vendors and also print Invoices and Purchase Orders on blank laser paper. This choice eliminated the need of purchasing pre-printed Purchase Orders and Invoices saving literally thousand of dollars per year. In addition to the laser output, they enabled the individual plies to print on the printers in the respective departments to further enhance their existing paper flow procedures.