Paid Feature: Advanced allocation is a chargeable feature. You need to raise a ticket with the Service Desk to have this option enabled on your account.
Advanced allocation is an optional feature that gives you control over where Peoplevox allocates inventory from when it creates pick actions. It affects allocation only, not the pick route: operators still walk the warehouse in the standard location sequence. Some examples of the challenges this feature is designed to solve:
Prioritise allocating goods in your returns area, even if that is not physically located at the start of your picking sequence.
Minimise picker travel distance by excluding some sections of the warehouse from the action.
Avoid unnecessary trips between floors by ensuring that goods are allocated from the ground floor first, and that pickers who do need to go to another floor work their way back down towards the ground floor.
Pick large wholesale or store replenishment orders directly from bulk locations, instead of replenishing the pick face only to pick the stock straight back out again.
The settings are on the Advanced allocation tab of an Action Profile, and in the Advanced allocation section of the Create action(s) screen. They are available for every action type, with one exception: picking from bulk locations is only available for 1 person picks 1 order actions. For an overview of creating actions and profiles, see Understanding and Using Actions.
Settings
Use Zones for Allocation?
This option requires that you have already divided your warehouse into zones (see Zones, below). You can hen control control which zones are allocated from first, and whether a particular zone is used for allocation at all. When the option is on, an Allocation sequence table lists each Location zone. Set a sequence number against a zone to control the order in which Peoplevox draws inventory from it, or set it to Do not allocate to exclude it. Selecting a different sequence for a zone moves it to that position in the list automatically.
Reverse IP Sequence?
Zones can be used in combination with the Reverse IP Sequence option. The system first orders your locations by zone, then reverses the sequence to allocate from the end backwards. Turning on Reverse IP Sequence? does not change how the zones are presented on screen. This option tells the system to work backwards and allocate from the highest sequence location first, down to the lowest. The pick route itself still uses the regular ascending IP sequence. This is useful when your pack bench is close to the end of your picking sequence, as it typically is, because it ensures that the picker starts their action as close to the pack bench as possible and minimises the total distance travelled during the pick.
Pick from Bulk Locations? and Pick from Pick Locations?
These two options control which location types the action can allocate inventory from. They are available on 1 person picks 1 order actions and profiles only.
Pick from pick locations? is on by default. With only this option on, the action behaves as it always has and allocates from pick locations only.
Pick from bulk locations? allows the action to allocate from bulk locations as well. With both options on, inventory is allocated from bulk first and the pick face covers the remainder.
Picking directly from bulk is intended for large wholesale or store replenishment orders, where the quantity required is more than the pick face would normally hold. Zone selections continue to apply to pick locations only, and there is no change to the picking workflow on mobile: the operator is simply directed to the bulk location.
Replenishment: By default, replenishment is triggered by order allocation, so a large order allocated from bulk can also trigger a replenishment for the same item, and the two may compete for the same bulk stock. You can either keep the default behaviour and accept that conflicts at bulk locations may occasionally occur, or ask Descartes Customer Support to change your replenishment trigger to use the physical quantity in the pick face instead, which avoids these conflicts.
User Guide
Setup
Permissions
To use Advanced allocation, you need the relevant permission. Each supported action type has its own (advanced) permission under Actions on the role, for example One person picking one order (advanced), which controls whether you see these extra options. Administrators have these enabled by default and can enable them for other roles from Users > Roles.
Zones
For a guide to setting up zones, see the step-by-step process in Pick by Zone. Advanced allocation uses zones only as a way to group locations together. It does not use the other properties of the zone, such as batch sizes or priority.
Tip: Zones are listed in order. Name your zones alphabetically or numerically based on their typical priority, for example 01 - Returns, 02 - Main warehouse, 03 - Secure storage.
Using Advanced Allocation
To use Advanced allocation:
Open an action profile from Actions > Action profiles and select the Advanced allocation tab. The same settings appear in the Advanced Allocation section when you create a one-off action from Actions > Create action(s).
In the example above, inventory is allocated from the Returns zone first, then Pick A, and finally Pick B if it is unavailable elsewhere.Use the drop-down list in the Allocation sequence column to rearrange zones or exclude them.
Zones set to Do not allocate move to the bottom of the list and are not considered when allocating inventory.
Picking
This feature does not change anything about the pick process. The changes described here only affect hard allocation and action creation. The walk route for pickers still follows the standard location sequencing determined by location group.