Pick Line Grouping In D365 SCM

In today’s consumer market, speed to customer is paramount. From the time a customer places an order, he or she is already looking for delivery information.

Picking efficiency is key to the fast order turnaround times customers expect. And you probably spend a lot of time thinking about these picking efficiencies in your warehouse and have implemented:

Slot inventory so that faster moving items are towards your shipping docks or put to floor locations.
Pick paths or location sequences so workers can logically travel through the warehouse to fulfill orders.

KPIs to ensure you are maximizing your resources as you pick and pack orders, and any small changes you can implement to improve picking efficiencies are warranted.

If you are using D365 Supply Chain Management, chances are you have had a worker come up to you and say, “I just picked from a location, and the mobile device is telling me to pick from the location again! I think something is wrong.”

Here’s how this conversation typically goes:

You check the Work Details and tell your employee, “No, this work header just has multiple picks for the same item from that particular location.”

Your employee is frustrated at the answer wondering why he/she simply cannot pick the entire quantity in one pass. You get frustrated because, although confirming multiple work lines for the same item at the same location may not seem time intensive in isolation, multiplied by the hundreds of pieces of work processed a day, the extra time adds up.

Until recently, our frustrated employee in this scenario was unavoidable without a mod or a creative work around.

Pick Line Grouping Explained

Now, you can implement a simple, yet powerful, feature called Pick Line Grouping, which was part of the 10.0.8 release.

Pick Line Grouping allows the system to group multiple work lines with the same item and location dimension into a single pick on the mobile device. The work lines themselves remain separated, but the picks get grouped on the mobile device.

In this blog post, we will walk through the setup, review the functionality, and call out the limitations of the Pick Line Grouping feature so that you can implement it in your warehouse.

Pick Line Grouping Setup

Navigate to the Warehouse Management module > Setup > Mobile Device > Mobile Device Menu Items.
Select your mobile device menu item that you use to complete work. This could be a User Directed, System Directed, or System Grouping menu item.
Enabled to toggle labeled “Group Pick”

Mobile Device Menu Items

Group Line Picking Functionality

It isn’t common for a customer to order the same line twice on a single sales order. So, if you are organizing your work to pick by sales order, this may not be the most helpful feature for you, but it would still work. However, this feature is helpful for instances where you are picking multiple sales orders at a time on a single work header. Let’s walk through an example.

1. Create a sales order for warehouse 24 for customer US-027. Add a line for 1 pcs of A0001.

Sales order details

2. Create another sales order for warehouse 24 and customer US-003. Add a line for 1 pcs of A0001.

3. Before releasing the orders, make sure that these orders end up on the same Wave and Work header. To do so update the “24 Shipping Default” wave template to “Process Wave at Release to Warehouse”= No and “Assign to Open Waves”=Yes. Then, release your sales orders.

4. Release the wave from the “All Waves” screen

5. When you see the work created you will notice that you have one work header with two work lines. Each work line relates back to the two sales order lines you created previously.

6. Log into your mobile device and use the menu item where you enabled “Group Pick.” Enter your work ID to display the work.

7. Even though you have two separate work lines for A0001, you will be presented with a single pick for 2 pcs on the mobile device.

8. Pick the 2 pcs. The both work lines get closed by the single pick.

both work lines get closed by the single pick

Pick Line Grouping Limitations

Using Pick Line Grouping to improve your picking efficiency is a great feature, but do remember there are some limitations. Your work line must be sorted by item ID so that the same item numbers are in sequence. Otherwise, Pick Line Grouping will not work. Some functionality is not supported with this feature: