When an outwards consignment requires picking, you may like to assign product to pallets for transport, or you may wish to keep the product as loose items 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.
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 palletising product on an outwards consignment.
An example unit conversion illustrating 9 stocked items makes a virtual pallet
Adding inventory and configuring pallets
When selecting inventory to pick on an outwards consignment, you have the ability to select pallets that already exist in your warehouse, choose items from a pallet if you're not picking the entire pallet, or choose loose items that may not be palletised in your warehouse.
This information is surfaced up on the inventory screen. Pallets are shown with a pallet icon, whilst loose items are represented with a cartons icon.
The add inventory screen showing two pallets. Notice the first pallet has been fully selected, indicating we are picking the entire pallet, whilst the second item illustrates picking 2 items from the pallet
When adding product to a consignment, selecting an entire pallet of product to add to the consignment will automatically bring that pallet configuration into your consignment. You are free to re-shape the pallet as required, but Consignly assumes that because you're picking the whole pallet, the pallet can be used as part of the outwards consignment.
An outwards consignment with some loose picks and an entire pallet of inventory added. Note the pallet is already configured for the full pallet of inventory added.
Configuring pallets
After the inventory is added to the consignment, you may like to re-shape the pallets, or assign loose items to a pallet for picking.
To do that, choose the Edit Pallets button on the shoulder of the Products card for the consignment.
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 and palletised product in Consignly. Note in this example that the palletised product is locked on that pallet and can't be moved. That is because the inventory has been added as a full pallet pick.
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.
Moving unpalletised product to a new pallet on the consignment. Note the pallet capacity has been exceeded.
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 147% capacity. That is because one product is configured for 9 items to a pallet. In this case, we have moved an additional 2 items to the pallet, plus 25 items of a different SKU onto the pallet.
In practice, it's likely that this pick would completed across several pallets, 9 items on the first pallet, with the balance on second or third pallets.
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.
Splitting the Cooler Small product using the action menu
In our case, the Cooler Small product is 20 items to a pallet. So we would likely want to split 5 items and then move these items, along with the 2 Cooler Large items to a third pallet.
To start, split the line item by choosing Split Product and entering 5 in the quantity field.
Enter the quantity to split
Next, create a new pallet and move 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 three pallets at different capacities.
The split line has been moved to a new pallet along with the other SKU's loose items
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 are leaving the warehouse may require labelling. Consignly supports generating labels based on the pallets that have been defined, as well as labels for unpalletised product.
There are two common labels used when dispatching product from the warehouse.
- Inventory (pallet) labels; and
- Dispatch labels
Inventory labels
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 dispatched from 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
Dispatch labels
Dispatch labels can be generated and affixed to pallets to provide additional information about the consignment. Information contained on a dispatch label include consignee and address information, for example.
From the action menu on the consignment, choose Download PDF > Inventory Labels PDF.
A dispatch label from Consignly
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
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.