Grocery fulfillment is fast evolving!. Customer expectations for precision, flexibility, and fast deliveries are continually increasing with grocery shopping. These rising expectations warrant increasing efforts and investments in technology. Hence, comprehensive order management and warehouse management systems play a vital role in streamlining multiple functions related to the throughput of groceries and their delivery.
The following are some key aspects of grocery fulfillment that apply to tech-enabled operations:
Controlling pilferages/ shortages/damages and expiry
- Extended produce quality and shelf-life – Rejected items are more efficiently separated and removed from good quality grocery products with the help of quality checks, both while receiving and outbound operations. This prevents cross-contamination and premature deterioration.
- Expiry date tracking – Pyrops WMS lets you track minimum shelf life so that you don’t accept orders that are likely to expire and add to your costs of wastage and also the outward shelf life to ensure the consumer has sufficient time for consumption before it goes stale.
- Pilferage -With accurate visibility of location-wise stock and continuous inventory control activities. Pyrops helps to reduce grocery pilferages.
- Identification and segregation of damaged products – It helps in timely corrective action. This helps get better visibility of stock. Also, it helps project the right inventory levels to the sales channels.
Replenishment between locations
Some organizations have multiple location-based fulfillment operations or they may have a mother warehouse. That can replenish the stock of its distribution centers in various locations. Also responsible for the shipping and delivering the orders to consumers. Pyrops WMS strengthens the coordination between the mother warehouse and the distribution centers.
- Real-time updating of inventory
- Facilitating quick decision making
- The customized procedure of transfer orders and approval
- Benchmarking and monitoring the inventory thresholds
Batch/Lot management
- For maintaining First Expiry First Out (FEFO) operations, you need clear visibility of batch-wise stock in the warehouse
- The system should ensure that it doesn’t allow multiple batches of the same product to get mixed on the same storage location.
- It helps to Batch control/lot control is critical for grocery warehousing
Fulfillment accuracy – scan based order packing
- Aligns the packaging process with picking strategy – Picking is also optimized by Pyrops, ensuring that it reduces the travel time considering the location of the products and the number of pickers available with various picking strategies. Considering the packing parameters like scanning an item, wrapping, printing, and the time that is required to pack the next item. Pyrops helps to avoid that waiting time and congestion.
- Real-time visibility of workflows – This is the most important aspect that ensures that you can achieve the required TAT through a user-friendly dashboard, intuitive graphical representation of workflow information, and optimal visual monitoring.
- Demand planning – This enables the warehouse to get prepared and organized in a forward-thinking manner. You can also organize the storage of goods in a way that products with frequent demand are easily accessible. Also, you can adjust other resources and strategies, like the required workforce and picking/packing strategies, according to the changes.
Pick a face and bulk storage areas in the warehouse
Pyrops help to add agility and speed in the everyday fulfillment activates by organizing the warehouse processes that are already being performed. Pick face is the zone in which you keep material quantities worth 2-3 days of fulfillment. Therefore, this zone is highly accessible. And bulk storage is the place where you store and use most of the products for replenishing the pick face area so that there is no hindrance in the picking activities. The WMS governs this arrangement in a way that it-
- Reduces the transit time during picking by optimizing the picking footprint
- Supports various picking activities according to the orders and the product characteristics
- Ensure that there is proper coordination, ensuring that pick faces are being replenished as and when required.
Fulfillment optimization/ Material distribution
Pyrops not only can increase the efficiency of labor and internal activities but apply a holistic approach towards supply chain management. As it also supports efficient material distribution with the following approaches: –
1. Prioritize order fulfillment based on customer SLA – It allows to prioritize orders for delivery allotment based on the order SLA. You can then choose the delivery service partner best suited to accomplishing the desired SLA.
2. Route plan-based fulfillment – It will be extremely beneficial to have your fleet tied in from various delivery service partners to your WMS to track their capabilities. Some service partners are quick with certain locations and pin codes, also they are efficient in handling certain kinds of products. So you can automatically rout them across customer orders.
Returns management
Returns management is a significant part of products like groceries where consumer preferences are not too specific and the prices are not that significant. Hence, Pyrops understands the opportunities, and the challenges associated with reverse logistics and helps you to make the most out of it by:
- Ensuring prompt and needful actions for returned goods
- Identify fit to use stock
- ERP integration, ensuring swift returns management for the consumers
Fulfillment visibility/tracking
Fulfillment visibility is even more significant for shop floor inventory transactions and increasing the throughput for groceries as the demand is frequent and relatively small in quantities. Real-time data for work order and labor movement becomes a necessity to ensure:-
- Better use of existing facilities
- Prompt confirmations and auto-assignment of storage bins
- Control inventory levels to reduce operating costs
- Increased mobility and convenience.
We ensure that we meet these goals through standardized reporting and efficient data capture, both of which are conducive to the following WMS capabilities: –
1. Dock management
When loads of perishables arrive, dock management becomes more critical. You can prepare your staff for inbound shipments, knowing exactly what is due to come in. They’ll verify products and quantities, record any discrepancies, perform quality checks and move the process smoothly into the put-away stage. Detailed visibility of your inbound operations allows you to optimize and manage the flow of goods.
2. Replenishment Cycles
Pyrops WMS helps you configure replenishment norms for various items of groceries based on their inward and outward flow trend. Therefore, based on preset thresholds or demand-based patterns, the system prompts for timely replenishment needs of products. This helps maintain the right inventory levels.
3. Bin management
Accurate visibility of bin-wise, batch/lot-wise stock is imperative to run seamless and accurate grocery fulfillment operations. With your WMS you need to assign product quantities to a bin via barcode.
Integrations with the front end systems
Integrations add value to your supply chain management process by enhancing control over your network of suppliers, vendors, and delivery service providers. Thus leading to better management of purchase orders, oversight of your internal and lateral storage facilities, and efficient material distribution. Following integrations offered by Pyrops support these objectives: –
- The client can push a file on a defined format with pre-specified data and you can pull the document to create a purchase order yourself. Hence helping you to improve the flow of data, reduce TAT and manual labor and strengthen your relationship with vendors. We will provide all the data in the format required by the client.
- Track the docket number with your delivery partners and provide real-time data about the movement of the products.
- Provide manifest updates to partners on processed shipments.
- Delivery Partners receive notifications for orders that are being packed for shipment.
- Information about the SKUs that are available for booking the orders.
WMS turns out to be the most flexible, scalable, and ROI value-efficient solution to optimize the throughput of grocery fulfillment. It helps to cut the costs with plunging errors and wastage. Therefore, picking orders are almost always correct and there are very few picking errors and customers have fewer goods with a short shelf life. Pyrops functionalities are being constantly upgraded, keeping into consideration various challenges related to grocery fulfillment.