Paid Feature: Advanced action creation is a chargeable feature. You need to raise a ticket with the Service Desk to have this option enabled on your account.
Introduction
Advanced action creation is an optional feature that gives your users greater flexibility and control over how Peoplevox generates actions for picking orders. Specifically, it allow users to control which sections of the warehouse are allocated to pick actions first (it does not affect the pick route - only the allocation).
Some examples of the challenges that this feature is designed to solve:
Prioritize allocating goods in your returns area, even if that isn't physically located at the start of your picking sequence
Minimize picker travel distance by excluding some sections of the warehouse from the action
Avoid unnecessary trips between different floors by ensuring that goods are allocated from the ground floor first - but if pickers do need to go to another floor, they pick down and work their way towards the ground floor
Advanced action creation options are currently available or planned for the following action types:
Pick and sort to trolley
Single item batch pick
One person picks multiple orders in a batch - orders
One person picks multiple orders in a batch - items
Tip: It is also possible to create a one person picks one order action in this way by choosing one of the action types above, and setting the order batch size to 1.
How does it work?
Reverse IP Sequence?
This option tells the system to work backwards and allocate from the highest sequence location first, down to the lowest. The pick route itself will still use the regular ascending IP sequence. This is really useful if your pack bench is close by to the end of your picking sequence (as it typically would be) because it ensures that the picker starts their action as close to the pack bench as they are able to, and minimizes the total distance travelled during the pick.
Use zones for allocation?
This option requires that you have already broken up your warehouse into zones (see below). After doing so, you can control which zones are allocated first (and whether a particular zone is used for allocation at all).
This can be used in combination with the option to reverse the IP sequence. The system will first order your locations by zone, then reverse the sequence to allocate from the end backwards.
User guide
Setup
Permissions
To use advanced action creation, you will need the relevant permission. Each supported action type has its own "advanced" permission that controls whether or not you see these extra options. Administrators will have these enabled by default, and can enable them for other users:
Zones
For a guide on the basics of setting up zones, please see the article here that outlines the step-by-step process.
Advanced action creation just uses the zones as a way to group locations together. It does not leverage the other properties on the zone (e.g. batch sizes, priority, etc.).
By default, zones are displayed during action creation in alphabetical order. It is recommended to name your zones alphabetically based on their typical priority. For example:
01 - Returns
02 - Main warehouse
03 - Secure storage
Creating actions
Advanced action creation can currently be used for two action types - "Pick and sort to trolley" and "Single item batch pick".
You can find the new functionality on the action creation popup after selecting the list of sales orders to batch:
In the example above, inventory will first be allocated from the Returns area, then the Main Warehouse, and finally from Secure Storage if it is unavailable elsewhere.
You can rearrange and exclude particular areas by using the drop-down list in the allocation sequence column:
Deselecting any zones will move them to the bottom of the list, and they will not be considered when allocating inventory. Selecting a different sequence for a zone will move that zone to the corresponding position in the list automatically:
Ticking the "Reverse IP Sequence?" checkbox will not affect the way the zones are presented on screen. If ticked, the locations will first by sorted using the allocation sequence based on the zone, and then that list of locations will be sorted in reverse order.
Picking
This feature does not change anything about the pick process.
The changes described here only affect the hard-allocation and action creation process. The walk route for pickers will still follow the same standard location sequencing determined by location group.