Orders are placed on products, which, during the real process, are packaged to create packages and pallets (HUs, TUs, main cargo items, and so on). Packaging is a warehouse process. Warehouse-specific information can influence the result (for example, pick sequence). For the end-to-end process, the package information is required long before the warehouse is reached.
Package Building is inserted into the overall planning process at the freight unit building step. It allows products to be combined into packages. These packages (within FUs) are later used in subsequent planning steps (manual and optimizer planning/VSR) to create freight orders and subsequent load planning).
Package Building Parameters:
Package building is defined by the package building profile. This enables certain process steps to be switched on or off, specific behavior to be defined (especially when building mixed packages), and also offers default attributes that can be overwritten by product-specific settings.
The following are examples of parameters:
Process Products by Layer: This parameter can turn off the creation of full product packages. By default, this is seldom required, but gives a mixed package building logic more freedom. For example, a certain customer always requires a specific product combination (even when ordering a high quantity), this can then be implemented in an enhancement receiving a full set of products.
Keep Layers Together: When building mixed packages, the parameter controls of a product can be split over multiple mixed packages. In some situations, this results in a better and more efficient plan. However, in more warehouse-driven scenarios, it might not be efficient to process a product twice for two packages. Therefore, it can be turned off.
Ignore Product Height: When consolidating leftover products that are not filling a complete package, or a complete product layer, the system tries to build mixed layers combining products with the same height. This step can be skipped if the product height is not important. As a result, all leftover product quantities can be combined directly resulting in standard nonstackable layers.
The package building profile is assigned to the FUBR. In addition, for freight unit building you can define the maximum number of package items that can be put into a single FU.
The relevant package building profile can be set depending on the process in:
- FUBR: define package building profile , store package estimate vs packaging hierarchy.
- Planning profile: define package building profile, enabling consolidation package building.
Product and Package Type Assignment:
The product and package type assignment is a new master data transaction that defines, for each product in the package builder, which package it goes into or onto.
To reduce the effort when maintaining those definitions, it is possible to work with generic patterns.
The definition can depend on the material/product, business partner, and shipping location. For example, product A is delivered with an EU pallet stacked up to 1.5 meters (first entry). However, when delivering this product to customer X from your warehouse Y, you use a different pallet type containing product A stacked up to 1.3 meters, because the customer can only handle pallets up to this height (second entry as exception).
The package builder will always prefer the most specific entry. It starts to search for an entry matching all three key fields exactly. If nothing is found, it will score all other keys in the following manner:
- How many keys match exactly?
- How many keys match by pattern?
- How many keys are initial?
It then selects the key with the highest score.
Package Building Selected Features: During package building, the system bundles products into packages based on specific constraints, while also keeping the total number of packages to a minimum. The system can also specify the exact position and orientation of each product item. You can define these constraints for different combinations of product, business partner, equipment, and location. If several constraints apply, the system always uses the most specific constraint.
The system creates mixed packages based on one of the following consolidation types:
- Volume
- Layer Definitions
- Incompatibilities, stacking rules, and product orientations (based on these values, the system determines the exact positions of each product item in the package (detailed mixed package building))
Furthermore, the definition allows specific limits to be set regarding the weight and height that the package builder considers when packing the product. It is possible to set valid limits on the package material (that is, product master data). For example, you can only stack an EU pallet up to 1.8 meters and put 900 kg on it. In the product and package type assignment, you can lower the specific product, customer, and location limits.
When creating packages, the system can split the quantity of a product using the following criteria:
- Quantity per package
- Maximum height of the package
- Maximum weight of the package
If different products are to be packaged, the system considers the lowest maximum height and the lowest maximum weight for a product or a packaging material. For example, if each product has a different maximum height, the system uses the lowest maximum height.
The result of package building is different types of packages, as follows:
- Packages that contain only a single type of product.
- Mixed packages that contain several different products.
- Packages that consist of several layers: The layers within a package can also contain different products, which results in mixed layers.
- Nested packages, that is, a package in another package: For example, you can plan 24 cans in one box and 100 boxes in ten layers on one pallet.
- Full packages or incomplete packages: Incomplete packages provide room for further consolidation.
- Flat or uneven packages: Flat packages are a prerequisite for stackability.
"Late" Package Building: The "late" or "consolidation" package building process defers the package building process until the vehicle scheduling and routing process has created freight orders for the individual tours. This allows to add additional information into the package building process, that is, which products are to be delivered with the same truck/tour/freight order. Consequently, this information can be utilized to build packages/pallets across FUs/deliveries.
Package Units: The Package Unit (PU) is an additional business document. It represents one or multiple packages to be transported together across multiple stages (capacity documents). The PU is not needed if there is only one stage. It can have a deep packaging hierarchy, for example, pallet–carton–product. It is (technically) a transportation unit (like container units, trailer units, and railcar units). It can represent both a capacity document and a demand document. That means, package units can be assigned to freight orders/bookings and container/trailer/railcar units, but at the same time FUs can be assigned to a package unit. Typical examples for package units are pallet, pallet cage, box, and carton.
The package unit provides additional functionality to enable an integrated delivery and line-haul planning process:
The PU type allows defining the flexibility of assigning predecessor documents to the PU:
- Completely: A FU is completely assigned to the PU. This is the standard approach of assigning FU.
- Partially: A FU can be distributed among multiple PUs (multi-assignment), but the PUs are assigned to one single capacity document. This is a new approach, which helps to avoid FU splits and an increasing number of documents in scenarios with freight units' items distributed across multiple package units (for example, pallets).
If PUs containing the same FU get assigned to different capacity documents, the FU gets split to ensure the fundamental FU consistency principle (it represents the goods transported together across the whole transportation chain).
