Introduction

  • 10 minutes

The Warehouse management module in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management lets you manage warehouse processes in manufacturing, distribution, and retail companies.

Warehouse management has a wide range of features to support the warehouse facility at an optimal level, at any time. It is fully integrated with other business processes in Supply Chain Management, such as transportation, manufacturing, quality control, purchase, transfer, sales, and returns.

In this module, you will learn how to:

  • Create warehouses and locations.
  • Configure work pools, zones, location format, and profiles.
  • Configure catch weight processing for warehouse management.
  • Create reservation hierarchies.
  • Configure location directives.
  • Configure wave templates.
  • Configure inventory statuses.

Every warehouse must have a layout that visually assists you in configuring the warehouse according to the physical layout of the business. In a warehouse, there might be some equipment that can help workers move products around the warehouse, such as forklifts and ladders.

Warehouse staff need to be able to put away items, pick items, and perhaps move them from one location of the warehouse to another, such as the shipping location.

A daily task for warehouse staff is to rearrange products to make space within a location for new item arrivals. Workers will be walking up and down aisles to pick or put away items for order. Warehouse workers can use their time and maximize productivity during daily operations by having the correct data and visibility of the available space of locations.

To increase the efficiency of a warehouse and maximize its storage capacity, companies need to accurately record information regarding the whereabouts of products, where warehouse staff can pick from and put away the products more efficiently.

When warehouse management is configured and used throughout the product life cycle, Supply Chain Management makes the work at the warehouse more efficient and manageable. For example, Warehouse management can quickly answer questions such as:

  • Where should/can this item be stored?
  • Which items should be/are ready to be shipped?

The benefits of warehouse management in Supply Chain Management include:

  • Optimizing your warehouse layout to increase efficiency.
  • Obtaining a complete overview of inventory to help improve customer service.
  • Streamlining your warehouse processes to reduce costs.
  • Processing transactions faster with a mobile device.
  • Providing workers with the ability to identify who performed every movement, cycle count, sales pick, transfer, and so on.
  • Giving workers a set of options that can allow them to dictate how inventory should be handled. These options can include specific instructions for each warehouse, for products or groups of products, and for quantities on an order. The system can be set up to require warehouse workers to follow detailed processes for inventory handling (at specific locations if needed). It can also give warehouse workers the authority to make independent decisions, depending on the worker.

Warehouse management in Supply Chain Management can be a great fit for companies with a relatively large number of transactions and in situations where they want to maintain and enforce specific processes for all transactions.

Warehouse management workspace

The Warehouse management module lets you manage warehouse processes in manufacturing, distribution, and retail companies. It has a wide range of features to support the warehouse facility at an optimal level, at any time. Warehouse management is fully integrated with other business processes such as transportation, manufacturing, quality control, purchase, transfer, sales, and returns.

To start working with Warehouse management, you need to complete the setup of the general warehouse parameters to support the business processes of your company. Go to the Warehouse management parameters page in Warehouse management > Setup to set up general warehouse parameters. You must configure components for inbound and outbound warehouse process workflows according to business requirements. The most important components that you must configure are wave templates, work templates, work pools, and location directives.

Warehouse management processes

The following are Warehouse management processes that can help you understand what needs to be configured in your own warehouse:

  • Integrated support for source documents for sales orders, returns, transfer orders, production orders, and kanbans.
  • Flexible inbound and outbound material workflow support based on queries.
  • Full integration with the manufacturing and transportation offerings.
  • Full control of location stocking limits and location volumetric.
  • Inventory properties that are controlled by inventory status.
  • Full batch and serial item support.
  • Various item receiving capabilities.
  • Multiple picking strategies.
  • Out-of-the-box support for the next generation of barcode scanners.
  • Pallet/container types for warehouse processes.
  • Advanced counting capabilities.
  • Label printing and label routing with Zebra ZPL support.
  • Business intelligence integration into Power BI.
  • Manual and automatic movement of inventory.
  • Fully integrated quality control (QMS).
  • Full traceability of workers' material handling.
  • Outbound wave processing.
  • Manual packing and automatic containerization support.
  • Cluster picking.
  • Simple cross docking.

For more information about the Warehouse management processes and how to perform them, see Work with warehouse management in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.