Glossary
Min/max replenishment
Min/max replenishment keeps a pick face between two numbers: when stock drops to the minimum, a task moves enough from bulk to bring it back to the maximum. The picker never finds an empty slot that the building could have filled.
What it is
Every pick face has a minimum and a maximum. The minimum is the alarm: below it, picking is about to stall. The maximum is the target: how much the slot should hold after a refill. Replenishment is the task that moves stock from bulk to the pick face when the alarm goes off, sized to reach the target.
Why it matters
Without min/max, replenishment happens when a picker finds an empty bin, which is the slowest possible moment. With it, the refill is a task in a queue that a forklift driver works through, ahead of the pickers.
It also protects bulk: nobody has to open a pallet in the bay to grab six units, because the pick face is where the six units live.
A worked example
A pick face for a yoga mat has minimum 8 and maximum 40. A morning of picking takes it from 20 to 7. The task appears: move 33 to the pick face. Bulk holds two pallets of 24; the task takes one full pallet and 9 from the other, and the face is back at 40 before the afternoon wave releases.
How DockingWare does it
DockingWare keeps min and max per pick face and creates the replenishment task from three places so none is missed: the pick that crosses the minimum, a scheduled sweep, and a check at startup. The task names the source pallet, and the handheld confirms the move by scanning it; the ledger writes the transfer from bulk to on hand in one row pair.
Questions
- How do I choose the minimum?
- Enough to cover picking until a replenishment task can be done, at the product's usual pace. If pickers empty the face in an hour and replenishment takes two, the minimum is too low.
- What triggers the task?
- A pick that brings the face to or below its minimum, a scheduled sweep that catches faces already below it, or a check at system start. Any of the three creates the task; none of them move stock.
- What if bulk is empty too?
- Then the task cannot be filled and the product is genuinely short. The system should say that plainly rather than create a task nobody can complete.