Is it Time for Your Warehouse to Start Dimensioning SKUs?

As the Product Manager for CubiScan, I've had many conversations with supply chain managers,?optimization software marketers,?and warehouse management system (WMS) vendors about stock keeping units (SKUs).?

Lucky you, I hear you say. But, please, don’t feel sorry for me. These conversations about SKUs are not as boring as might seem at first glance. Often they include a mild eureka moment in which the supply chain manager realizes that someone else really understands their requirements and the drivers behind them, and that there is an almost perfect solution just waiting to solve their problem.

And that problem is, how to accurately, efficiently, and with as little human intervention as possible (pesky humans!), identify, weigh, and dimension a huge warehouse full of stock keeping units. If only there was an easy and automated way to do this!

Well of course there is. No worries at all. A wide variety of great solutions are available, and let's be honest, if you are the supply chain manager reading this you probably won’t have to do the work anyway. I hear you chuckle and that's okay. But let’s run through the various factors to determine?if you should get someone else to do this...?

Got SKUs? Got a WMS? Got Optimization?

Many supply chain managers already know that they need to cube and weigh the thousands of SKUs that mock them every day with their mysterious dimensions and a decision has been made to do so but for whatever reasons they just haven’t launched the initiative yet.?

However, many other managers are still in that early stage of uncertainty and consideration and the rest of this post may help you in this further-investigation process.?So, let’s think about the whole concept a bit further.

With increasing competition and ever decreasing margins anything a supply chain oriented business can do to cut costs and increase efficiencies is worth investigating. Combined with the right warehouse management systems, including effective optimization programmes, introducing a regime of cubing and weighing SKUs can revolutionize a supply chain business.

Cubing, or dimensioning - in other words, measuring the length, width and height of a box; or, in the case of an irregular shaped item, say a basketball, determining the smallest cuboidal shape the item would fit into, is now a critical concern everywhere, worldwide.

Cubing and Weighing SKUs in Warehouse and DC operations can deliver tremendous benefits.?

If you think about it, almost every customer order begins its life as an SKU, waiting patiently to be picked. Whether the order is made up of just one lonely SKU or a packed or boxed bundle of a dozen mixed SKUs, the order is comprised of SKUs. And shipping the order, now converted into an individual item of freight, means that somewhere someone is going to cube it and charge us accordingly – or back charge us accordingly as the case may be.

Because of this we know we want to ship an order in the smallest package or carton the order will fit into. In other words, we don’t want to pay to ship air, right? Space is money. So, just for this one reason alone, the importance of having accurate SKU dimensional data available for the purposes of optimizing cartonisation outcomes, we know we need the cubic dimensions – and, while we’re at it, the weight of each and every SKU in the DC.

Cube a dustpan? Yes you can!

A prerequisite, however, for implementing cartonisation or any other type of?optimization software, whether on its own or as part of a wider warehouse management system (WMS) initiative, is the creation of an accurate database of the weight and cubic dimensions of every SKU in the warehouse. It might sound like an impossible undertaking, especially if you have tens or hundreds of thousands of SKUs, but it can be much easier than you think.??

And just to be clear, the dimensioning and weighing of SKUs and getting this data quickly into the WMS includes those SKUs already in the DC and those SKUs that are incoming on a daily or periodic basis.

Not just shipping optimization: there’s more, much more.???????

Without going into too much detail here are the?9 Key Reasons to Dimension and Weigh Warehouse SKUs:

1.????Buying a new Warehouse Management System or vetting a potential WMS vendor. Wouldn't you like to be able to say: “Tell me, WMS salesperson, what intelligent decisions your WMS software can make with our precise SKU dimensional data?”

2.????New Warehouse or DC design. For example, how do we determine what storage, racking, or bin systems should be used? How do we know what area is actually required?

3.????Storage Locations. An intelligent WMS can make space-based decisions.

4.????Slotting decisions within pick zones.?

5.????Picking directly into the right shipping cartons and item placement within these cartons.

6.????Check weighing and verification for quality control and security.

7.????Load building, container loading, and pallet building optimization software.

8.????Shipping optimization and dim-weights as discussed above.

9.????Your WMS simply requires this data, full stop. You may not know all of the optimization capabilities inherent in the WMS but you do know that you have been tasked with getting the SKU dimensional data right, and into the system.

If the above represents the types of thinking taking place in your discussions with fellow stakeholders then you are on the right track. In other words, it looks like?Yes! Is it Time for Your DC or Warehouse to Start Dimensioning SKUs.

Next Steps.?To learn more about how easy it can be to solve this or other seemingly daunting tasks please visit us on the web

www.cubiscan.ae

Priyank Srivastava