Introduction

This page describes how to create actions to pick inventory for orders.

Picking operators working with Peoplevox are given instructions of which items to pick using actions created in the Peoplevox web app. These actions replace the paper picking slips commonly used for this purpose in many warehouses.

When an action is created in the web app, it becomes available for completion using a suitable device equipped with the Peoplevox mobile app. Actions can be released to certain groups of operators or to all operators, giving you flexibility in pick delegation and order fulfilment.

Actions can also be created automatically by Peoplevox to replenish items in pick locations, if this option is enabled on your account.

How Actions Work

An action must be created for a sales order to be picked. Sales orders and their associated actions are inter-dependent and it is important to understand how they affect each other.

You create actions from the Actions menu in the web app. That menu also gives you the tools to review what you have created: View actions lists the actions themselves, Action creation activities records each attempt to create them, and Failed actions handles picks that could not be completed. Each is covered below.

Creating Actions

Actions are created in the web app to pick sales orders for which inventory has been allocated. Select Actions > Create action(s) to open the action creation screen.

The screen is divided into sections you work through in order: General, Picking, Filter, Sales Orders and Advanced Allocation. A counter at the top of the screen shows how many actions, orders and items your current selections will produce, and it updates as you change them. Use it to check the result before you commit.

When you are satisfied with the counts, create the actions using the toolbar at the top of the screen.

General

The General section covers who the action is for and how it is identified.

• Action category: The type of work the action represents. Select Pick to pick sales orders.

• Site: The site the action applies to. Check this before going further, because it determines which orders are available.

• Assign to role: The role the action is released to. The default is [Anyone], and any user assigned to the role you select can perform the action.

• Priority: The relative priority of the action, used to order work for your operators.

• Comments: Free text shown to the operator picking the action.

Picking

The Picking section controls how orders are grouped and picked.

Start with Action Type, because it governs what the rest of the section offers. Peoplevox supports six action types:

• 1 person picks 1 order: One operator picks a single order.

• Multi-order batch pick - items: One operator picks several orders together, working item by item.

• Multi-order batch pick - orders: One operator picks several orders together, working order by order.

• Pick and sort to trolley: One operator picks several orders to a trolley, sorting into slots as they go.

• Pick by zone: Picking is divided across warehouse zones.

• Single item batch picking: A batch made up of single-item orders.

You can find more detail on the picking methods themselves in this article.

The remaining fields in the section are:

• Change to "1 person picks 1 order" for single-order actions?: When a batch turns out to contain only one order, this converts it to a single-order pick rather than creating a batch of one.

• Batching method: How orders are grouped into batches. See Batching Methods below.

• Batch size: The number of orders in each batch. This is fixed at one for 1 person picks 1 order.

• Customer name: Restricts the action to orders for a named customer.

• Completion deadline: The time by which the action should be completed.

Batching Methods

When an action type picks more than one order at a time, Peoplevox has to decide which orders belong together in a batch. The Batching method field controls that decision. It is available for every action type except 1 person picks 1 order, which picks a single order and has nothing to group.

Each action type has always had its own way of grouping orders. That behaviour is now named explicitly in the Batching method field, so the default you see depends on the action type you selected:

Action Type	Default batching method	Alternative
1 person picks 1 order	Not applicable	Not applicable
Multi-order batch pick - items	By requested delivery date	By order footprint
Multi-order batch pick - orders	By order age	By order footprint
Pick and sort to trolley	By order age	By order footprint
Pick by zone	By location sequence, within zone limits	By order footprint
Single item batch picking	By location sequence and order age	By order footprint

By Order Footprint

An order's footprint is the set of locations an operator has to visit to pick it. By order footprint builds each batch from orders whose footprints overlap, so the operator walks a smaller area to complete the batch.

Peoplevox builds a footprint batch as follows:

1. Inventory is allocated to the orders in scope, so the picking locations for each order are known.

2. The warehouse footprint of each order is calculated from those locations.

3. A batch is seeded with the product needed by the greatest number of orders, preferring orders with smaller footprints.

4. Orders that add nothing to the batch's footprint are added first, then those that add least, until the batch size is reached.

5. The process repeats until the available orders are batched.

The benefit depends on how your inventory is distributed across the warehouse. Where popular products are spread across many locations, grouping by footprint can cut walking distance noticeably.

We are still building a picture of which warehouse layouts and order profiles gain most from footprint batching. If you trial it, we would like to hear how it went, whether the result was good or not. Tell us the action type you used, your batch size and what you saw happen to your pick times, and send it to Descartes Customer Support. What you tell us shapes the guidance we publish here.

Filter

The Filter section decides which orders are considered for batching. Filtering is optional, but it is worth doing. Without a filter, Peoplevox selects from the oldest qualifying orders for your action type.

Select a saved filter in User Filter, or build conditions directly in Filter query. Sorting controls the order in which qualifying orders are considered, and offers Oldest orders first or Newest orders first.

Saved filters are managed on their own screen. See Order Filters below.

Sales Orders

The Sales Orders section lists the orders matching your filter, with the sales order number, requested delivery date, priority, carrier, service type and item count. The section header shows the total.

Leave the list alone to act on every matching order, or select individual orders to restrict the action to those you choose.

Advanced Allocation

The Advanced Allocation section controls where inventory is taken from.

Turn on Use zones for allocation? to allocate from specific location zones, then set an Allocation sequence against each zone to control the order Peoplevox draws from them. Leave a zone set to Do not allocate to exclude it.

Reverse IP Sequence? reverses the internal pick sequence, which suits warehouses that prefer operators to work a route in the opposite direction.

Action Profiles

An action profile captures the decisions you would otherwise make each time you create an action, and saves them for reuse. Creating a profile is much like creating an action: you choose an order filter that determines which orders are batched, choose the action type used to pick them, and set the other parameters such as batch size, batching method and the role the action is released to.

Once saved, you can run a profile on demand to create a wave of actions, or schedule it to run automatically. Profiles can be grouped to keep them organised, and marked inactive when you want to keep a profile without running it.

Select Actions > Action profiles to see your profiles, their action type, schedule, next execution and sequence.

Open a profile to edit it. A profile has six tabs: General, Filter, Picking, Advanced allocation, Schedule and Execution History. The Filter, Picking and Advanced allocation tabs hold the same settings as the matching sections on the action creation screen, so the batching method you choose for a profile behaves exactly as it does for a one-off action.

Scheduling a Profile

The Schedule tab runs a profile automatically, so a wave of actions is created without anyone walking through the action creation screen.

Turn on Scheduling enabled, then set when the profile runs:

• Schedule from: The date and time the schedule becomes active.

• Recurrency: How often the profile runs. Choose Daily, Every 15 minutes, Every 30 minutes or Every hour.

• Week days: The days the profile runs. Clear a day to skip it.

• Day time: The window during the day in which the profile runs, set with the start and end sliders.

The tab also shows Next execution at and Last scheduling at, so you can confirm the schedule is behaving as you expect.

Two further settings control how a scheduled profile behaves alongside others:

• Minimum order threshold: The smallest batch allowed when creating an action. Actions are only created when enough qualifying orders exist to justify sending a picker out.

• Sequence: The relative priority of profiles set to run at the same time. Only one action creation process runs at a time, so sequencing decides the order in which overlapping requests are handled. You might give a high-priority profile targeting same-day delivery orders an early sequence number, and let a lower-priority profile batch the remaining orders immediately after.

The Execution History tab records each run of the profile, with its status, who or what enqueued it, and how long it took.

Order Filters

Order filters decide which orders an action or profile considers. Building them on their own screen means you can write a filter once and reuse it across several profiles.

Select Actions > Setup > Order filters to manage them. Filters are listed under My Filters and Shared Filters, with the owner and a count of linked profiles against each one.

A filter layers search conditions on one another to produce a specific, targeted set of orders. You might combine an item count range with a carrier service code, for example, to isolate small parcels going out on a particular service.

Monitoring Action Creation

Select Actions > Action creation activities to review recent attempts to create actions. The screen covers every route into action creation, whether someone created the action by hand, ran a profile, or a scheduled profile ran unattended in the background.

Search by action creation ID, status, action type, profile, the user who enqueued it or site. Results show the status, when the request was enqueued and started, how long it took, and when it finished.

Open an activity to see its detail. Along with a timeline of the request, the detail records the full picking configuration used on that run, including the action type, Batching method, batch size and any zone allocation settings, together with the orders that were batched. You can navigate from here to the actions the run produced.

Because the batching method used is recorded against each run, this screen is the place to confirm what a scheduled profile actually did, rather than what its current configuration says it should do.

Viewing and Deleting Actions

Select Actions > View actions to list the actions in your warehouse. Search by action type, name, location, priority, sales order number, service type, site or status, and open an action to see its detail. Actions can be viewed and printed from this screen, along with the orders associated with each one.

An action can be deleted if an operator has not yet started it, that is, if it is not locked to a user. Select the action and delete it, then confirm.

If an action contains more than one sales order, you cannot remove individual orders from it. The whole action must be deleted, which leaves the other sales orders in that action without an action associated with them.

If an operator has already started an action on the mobile app and you want to stop it being picked, you need to find the operator and ask them to enter a skip reason for each item you do not want picked.

Handling Failed Actions

A failed pick action is one in which one or more items could not be picked. Peoplevox requires the operator to record a skip reason, which automatically creates a failed action.

Select Actions > Failed actions to review them. Each entry shows the action name, item code, location name and barcode, quantity, the reason recorded, the user who recorded it, when it failed and the date of the last stock take at that location. Search by site, location, reason or age.

A failed action causes a location to be blacklisted, preventing further actions being created to pick items from that location until the failed action is handled.

Start by going to the location in the warehouse where the skipped item was supposed to be stored, and check whether it is there.

If the item is in the location and undamaged:

1. Handle the failed action in either the web app or the mobile app to remove the location from the blacklist.

   • In the web app, select the failed action and click Handle.

   • In the mobile app, select Stock Control, select Failed Actions, select the action and tap HANDLE. Tap HANDLE ALL to clear every failed action at once.

2. Create a new action for the same order, which now shows as partially picked, and complete the pick on the mobile app. If you have several failed actions to clear, group the partially picked orders together and create a batch pick.

If the item cannot be found or is damaged:

1. Use the Adjustments function in either app to set the inventory level to the amount needed to fulfil the order. If the item is out of stock, the customer must be informed. There is more on Adjustments in the user's guide to managing inventory.

2. Handle the failed action as described above.

3. Create a new action for the same order and complete the pick on the mobile app.

Handle failed actions as they happen rather than letting them build up. The more failed actions in the system, the more blacklisted locations there are, and the fewer picking actions can be created. We recommend making this the job of a dedicated stock control team, so pick operators are not diverted.

Troubleshooting

To reduce the likelihood of failed actions, we recommend that whenever possible:

• Actions are only created once a sales order is confirmed and unlikely to change.

• Actions are only released to operators when you are sure that the required inventory is available.

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