Smoothen the Order Picking Process Through Netsuite

Our Client

Our client is a wholesale distribution and e-commerce company with multiple large warehouses. They are using NetSuite and Suite Commerce Advanced.

Project Objective

Our client is using NetSuite and SCA and they wanted to customize NetSuite in order to design, develop, and integrate a single sales order picking feature with NetSuite that smoothen the order picking process in a warehouse. The new NetSuite customization should be browser independent and responsive.

NetSuite customization Requirement

Our client was printing all the Sales Orders from NetSuite and pick the items from the warehouse. They faced following hindrances.

• The process was slow hence productivity was low.
• There was no error detection mechanism.
• Once the pick process complete, the employees need to login NetSuite and create the item fulfillment manually. Error in item fulfillment causes chaos in inventory management.
• If there are many items in a single sales order, then it was not possible to split the SO and it cannot fulfill by multiple employees simultaneously.
• As a single employee couldn’t handle all the orders, the coordination was nearly impossible or minimum and there was confusion in order picking, thereby reducing productivity.
• Items available in the sales order scatter in different bins. Even though the bins arrange. Each bin had unique items, hence collecting orders were a dreary task.
• Also, ambiguity in the availability of orders caused mismatches as well as missing orders.

To eliminate the hard-hitting task of arrangement and to ease the sales order picking, our client decided to modify the existing manual task to a technology-driven NetSuite customization and creating an add-on. Our client needed a web app that is on par with the NetSuite guidelines and it should completely sync with NetSuite so that the app can get and post data from NetSuite.

Our proposed technology and solution

In this scenario, a web app was a relieving solution to use in order to simplify the process. This Netsuite customization contained options to scan sales order or an item to be added. App gets the SO data from NetSuite. The technology eased the operation relating to data which can be used on various devices like mobile phones, laptops, desktops, tablets etc. The app was designed to speak the work with excellent pictorial and communicative GUI helping in screen selection.

We have used NetSuite SuiteScript 2.0, html5, CSS, and JavaScript to achieve the desired goal. The web app creates to manage all the sales orders to streamline the complete process of order picking in alignment with the company. The following steps are the description of what each screen explains to the customer to do on processing an order.

To open the web app, we have placed a custom menu in NetSuite. To access this add-on, the user should have Warehouse administrator role in NetSuite.

Two screens

Screen 1.
 This screen helps the user to scan sales order

Screen 2.
 Shows the details of sales order scanned to the system: SO number, Items, bins, quantity, item image, description, item selection check box, and real-time picking status. The order can scan or manual entry is possible.

Required Validations imply on entering the quantity (not more than the quantity available in the bin). The list was in the order of the bins. The number of orders can select and enter accordingly. Once the order is picked, the user can click on complete and move to the next screen. On clicking the complete button, NetSuite automatically creates item fulfillment for the sales order. Eventually, NetSuite makes changes in inventory.

The biggest advantage of this NetSuite customization for warehouse management is that the bigger sales orders (above 100 items) are split into multiple employees, making their work easier for them to pick orders. An employee with 100 item is allowed to enter or pick only 60 items in a single entry. If there are more than 100 items in a single sales order, the system allows multiple users to work on a single sales order. In effect, we are automating partial fulfillment of a single sales order.

Items in sales order are rearranging based on bin arrangement hence the user need not wander inside the warehouse. Every employee details are stored, in order to verify and cross-check the number of orders picked by each employee, which helps to keep track of their tasks.

Result

The Web app implements in some of our other clients too who was in search of Single sales order picking in NetSuite that smoothens the order picking process in a warehouse. Clients responded positively to this new NetSuite customization. The following were the excellent results providing our happy clients:

• Complete automation of the process.
• Reduced paper works.
• Increased productivity and ROI.
• Nearly zero error in the process.
• Increased visibility.
• Better inventory management.