When an inwards consignment comes into your warehouse, you may receive product as loose items, or you may wish to palletise the product in Consignly.
Palletising a product allows you to tell Consignly what and how much of a product exists on a physical pallet. When you do this, the pallet of product (or mixed products) are given a unique pallet number and can be scanned and tracked throughout the warehouse.
Palletised and unpalletised products
Consignly supports working with both palletised product, and unpalletised or loose product.
We've taken the decision to support both flavours and allow them to co-exist with each other because that's how the real world works.
Not all product stored in a warehouse is located on physical pallets, sometimes items are stored loose in an area of a warehouse.
Damages is a good example of that. Often a warehouse will have a location specifically allocated to hold damaged product.
This product may not be palletised. It may just sit on the floor in the warehouse.
Requiring the product to be put on a pallet and labelled as such is effort wasted. Splitting an item from a pallet, receiving that item loose to a damages location, and potentially tagging the item with a damages attribute can much more accurately reflect what is actually happening in the warehouse.
Other times warehouse operators may choose to receive product into store as loose items, and only palletise the product on the outbound process.
By supporting both loose and palletised products, Consignly is able to better model the real world.
Determining the standard quantity that fits on a pallet
In Consignly, a virtual pallet is used to work out how much of a product or products can fit on one pallet.
In the product definition for the Client Partner, use the Product Unit Conversion table to set the number of items that makes up a virtual pallet.
Once this is set, you'll be able to have Consignly automatically suggest the number of pallets required when bringing product into the warehouse on an inwards consignment.
An example unit conversion illustrating 9 stocked items makes a virtual pallet
Configuring pallets
When entering product on an inwards consignment, the quantity on the line indicates the number of stocked items you'll be receiving.
Next, you'll want to define the pallet makeup for this consignment.
To do that, choose the Edit Pallets button on the shoulder of the Products card for the inwards consignment.
The Edit Pallets button in the Products card in Consignly
In the Edit Pallets blade, Consignly will show you all Unpalletised Products at the top of the blade. Unpalletised products are products that exist on the consignment but have not yet been configured into pallets.
In Consignly, your consignment can have a mixture of palletised and unpalletised products if you desire.
Unpalletised product in Consignly
Creating a pallet
To create a pallet, choose the Add Pallet button on this blade. Consignly will create a new empty pallet for you.
To fill this pallet with product, you need to move items from the Unpalletised Products section onto this pallet.
This can be done in two ways:
- Drag the product onto the pallet
- Use the action menu at the end of a product line and choose Move To, selecting the destination pallet you wish to move the product to.
Creating a new pallet and moving the unpalletised product to it
To save the pallet configuration, choose the Save Changes button. Consignly will now reconfigure the product information on the consignment to reflect the pallet configuration you've built.
The consignment Products card with the pallet and product make up
Splitting a product and reconfiguring product on a pallet
Each pallet has a capacity indicator to illustrate how full the pallet is, based on standard quantities defined for each product.
In the example above, you can see that the pallet we created is at 200% capacity. That is because this product is configured for 9 items to a pallet. In this case, we have moved the whole 18 items to the new pallet.
In practice, it's likely that this product would be stored across 2 pallets, 9 items per pallet.
To support that, product lines may be split, with the split lines being moved to another pallet.
To split a line, choose the action menu at the end of the product line and select Split Product.
The Split Product menu item on the product line
Consignly will prompt you for the amount of the product you wish to split. In this case, let's split 9 of the 18 items.
We can do this by typing 9 into the Quantity field.
The Split Product dialog
After splitting the line, you'll notice there are now two product lines (9 per line) on the pallet. At this point, we can create a new empty pallet.
The line item has been split into two lines of 9 items per line
Once a new empty pallet is created, we can move one of the line items by dragging and dropping it to the new pallet, or by using the Move To item in the action menu. You'll notice below we now have two pallets that are at 100% capacity.
The split line has been moved to a new pallet
Product can be moved between pallets using the drag and drop mechanism, or by using the Move To item from the action menu at the end of each product line.
Auto-palletising
Consignly offers the ability to automatically palletise your Unpalletised Product using the Auto Palletise feature.
When auto-palletising, Consignly will inspect each product line and using the standard pallet quantities for that product, intelligently create pallets for that product, splitting the product line across pallets where appropriate. It ensures that the pallet contains no more than 100% capacity.
Using this feature will ensure a pallet per product, and reduces the effort of manually creating, splitting, and moving product lines onto pallets.
Auto-palletising product lines in Consignly
Labelling
Palletised goods that come into a warehouse may require labelling. Consignly supports generating labels based on the pallets that have been defined, as well as labels for unpalletised product.
From the action menu on the consignment, choose Download PDF > Inventory Labels PDF.
The Inventory Labels option from the Download PDF action menu
This option will generate a label for each unpalletised product line, as well as a label per defined pallet.
Labels can be printed and affixed to the pallets as they are receipted into the warehouse.
The pallet will have a Consignly-generated unique pallet identifier which will appear on each pallet label. If the Client Partner is configured for GS1 and supports SSCC labelling, then the SSCC will be printed instead of the Consignly-generated unique pallet identifier.
Example label with the Consignly pallet identifer
SSCC labelling
If your Client Partner has been configured to support GS1 SSCC labelling then you may generate SSCC labels for pallets created in Consignly for that Client.
Next to each pallet is a Generate SSCC button (if this button is not visible then it may be your Warehouse has not been configured properly).
For each pallet, optionally generate the SSCC number for that pallet. Consignly will use the Client Partner's GS1 configuration to consume a new pallet number for use on that pallet.
Tapping Generate SSCC will assign an SSCC number to the pallet using the GS1 configuration on the Client Partner.
Often you might like to generate SSCC numbers for all pallets.
Using the action menu in the Edit Pallets blade, choose Generate Missing SSCC. Consignly will generate an SSCC number for all pallets that don't have one supplied already.
Generate all missing SSCC number using the action menu
An example pallet label with an SSCC number generated
Reusing existing pallet labels
Often pallets may come into store with a pallet label from the supplier or forwarding party. In this case, existing pallet identifiers may be used so as not to have to relabel the pallet.
In the Edit Pallet blade, supply the external pallet identifier in the Reference Number field next of the pallet. By doing this, Consignly will support scanning that pallet identifier in order to verify the pallet.
This can optimise the receiving process if the party shipping the goods to your warehouse has provided this information and already labelled the pallets.
An example with an external pallet reference provided
Consignly pallet identifiers
All pallets generated in Consignly will contain a Consignly Pallet Identifier. This takes the format of an alpha-alpha-number format, such as BCCAC-JWBL-000007.