Overview
The following are interconnected elements that facilitate the outbound process from order fulfilment to final shipping.
- Sales Orders: Sales orders are the initial customer orders that are created in Dynamics 365. They contain information about the customer, ordered items, quantities, pricing, shipping addresses, and other relevant details.
- Waves: Waves are used to group sales orders together for efficient processing in the warehouse. A wave represents a collection of orders that are released to the warehouse simultaneously to optimize picking, packing, and shipping operations. Waves can be created based on various criteria such as order type, priority, delivery date, or specific items.
- Shipments: Shipments represent the physical packages or containers that hold the products to be shipped. A shipment is created for each sales order or a group of sales orders within a wave. Shipments contain information about the products, quantities, packaging details, and shipping addresses.
- Containers: Containers represent the physical units used to transport goods. Containers are associated with shipments and provide a way to manage the packing and loading of products. Containers can be pallets, crates, boxes, or any other transportable units. They are assigned to shipments to organise and track the movement of goods during transportation.
- Loads: Loads are logical groupings of shipments that are prepared for transportation. A load is created to consolidate shipments that are going to the same destination or share a common transportation mode or carrier. Loads help optimise the shipping process by consolidating multiple shipments into a single transport unit.
In other words, think of a load as the object the delivery will be carried in, ranging from a shipping container or lorry to a single package that is delivered via parcel. These loads can contain one or multiple shipments. Shipments represent the portion of the load that will be delivered to a single destination; generally, a customer. One or more sales orders can be within a single shipment. Consider the load and shipment to be an empty lorry and an empty pallet at this point. This nested relationship must be created for shipping waves and work to be created. Consider a wave as instructions to the warehouse as to how to fulfil a sales order, shipment, and/or load. These instructions include “work,” which represents lines on a pick list(s) for shipment(s). Once the work is completed (picked and packed), the truck and shipment are now full and ready to be shipped to the customer.
It is also worth noting that depending on whether the loads are created manually or automatically the order in which the aforementioned shipments, containers, waves and loads are created will change.
Manual load creation
Please note that the below manual process will most likely never be used as the main process in a practical application. The process is documented to illustrate the functions, key concepts and/or relationships between sales orders, loads, shipments, waves and work.
Setup
To configure for manual processing various parameters would need to be considered. These include:
Warehouse management > Setup >Waves > Wave templates
- Automate wave creation: No.
- Process wave at release to warehouse: No
- Automate wave release: No
- Assign to open waves: No.
Warehouse management > Setup > Warehouse management parameters > Loads
- Automatically create Load at SO entry: No.
- Consolidate loads during wave processing: Yes / No. This determines whether multiple loads to the same customer/address are consolidated. To see the impact of this setting the automatic wave creation and processing at release to warehouse will need to be switched off.
Once a sales order is entered, the Warehouse management > Loads > Outbound load planning workbench is used to select the sales orders and add them to loads. The action of clicking either To new load or To existing load will determine whether a new load is created or if this sales order line is added to one of the existing loads displayed in Loads pane in the bottom half of the screen.
Once the new load has been created, it will be displayed in the Loads pane. The Load would be selected and the Release > Release to warehouse button clicked.
Upon releasing the load to the warehouse the load status is changed to Posted, and a shipment and wave are created. The shipment can be viewed in Warehouse management > Shipments > All Shipments (among other places). Note the related sales order and load numbers exist but the wave does not yet exist.
To create, process and release a wave (and therefore create the picking warehouse work), go to Warehouse management > Outbound waves > Shipment waves > All waves and click New. Any shipments will need to be manually added to the wave by clicking the Maintain shipments button. Finally, the wave will need to be Processed and Released and at this point any warehouse work will be created.
Clicking the Related information > Work button will show the warehouse work that has been created, and clicking the Print > Pick list will print a pick list if required:
Warehouse work to pick from the RECV location and put to a staging location and then the final put to the BAYDOOR:
Clicking the Print > Pick list button:
Once the workers have processed the above warehouse work using the mobile device, the outbound process must be completed by confirming the shipment. This can be done in either the All shipments or the Load planning workbench screens by clicking the Confirm outbound shipment button
Automatic process
Setup
To configure for automatic processing various parameters would need to be considered. These include:
Warehouse management > Setup >Waves > Wave templates
- Automate wave creation: Yes. Automatically creates the wave upon release to the warehouse
- Process wave at release to warehouse: Yes
- Automate wave release: Yes
- Assign to open waves: Yes / No. This determines whether a new wave is created or an existing wave is used.
Warehouse management > Setup > Warehouse management parameters > Loads
- Automatically create Load at SO entry: No.
- Consolidate loads during wave processing: Yes / No. This determines whether multiple loads to the same customer/address are consolidated. To see the impact of this setting the automatic wave creation and processing at release to warehouse will need to be switched off.
Warehouse management > Setup > Release to warehouse > Shipment consolidation policies
- Determines if, how and when shipments will be consolidated.
Once a sales order is entered, the release to warehouse button is clicked to create the shipments and shipment lines. A shipment is a single delivery (of items) to a single address (and the same mode of delivery). This means that the shipment lines of multiple sales orders for the same delivery address and mode of delivery could be on the same shipment.
After creating the shipment, Dynamics 365 will look for a Wave template which matches the shipment. The wave template will determine whether the shipment will be added to an existing wave or a new wave is created.
The wave will be processed and the picking warehouse work will be created. Dynamics 365 will try to create one instance of warehouse work for all the shipment lines on the wave (the queries on the work templates and location directives would be used to break that work up if required).
When the wave is processed, the shipment lines will also be added to a Load. A Load is a collection of shipments that are to be delivered at the same time.
The below screenshot shows an individual sales order being released to the warehouse via the sales order entry screen, but multiple sales orders can be released either via Sales and marketing > Sales orders > All sales order by selecting the Warehouse > Release to warehouse option in the Action pane, or from the Warehouse management > Release to warehouse > Release to warehouse menu.
By releasing the order to the warehouse within the sales order and changing the Wave template parameters as described above, many of the steps from the manual process are eliminated. To complete the automatic process, the warehouse work will need to be processed and the shipment confirmed in the same way as in the manual process above.
Learning with Microsoft
Further information related to raw material picking can be found on Microsoft Learn via the URL below.
Sales order picking and consolidated shipments – Training | Microsoft Learn