Automated Goods Receiving and Reconciliation

With the increasing consumer expectations of shorter delivery times, moving goods at a lightning speed has become more of a need than a want for the supply chain professionals. Moving closer to the consumers using dark warehouses, increasing inventory churn, increasing throughputs, adopting technology to improve accuracies are a few strategies adopted by many leading distributers. Another such strategy is to automate the Goods Receipt, which is a critical process in any warehouse. It is highly time consuming and manpower intensive and can become a bottleneck in the operational flow.

Once received from the vendors or suppliers, the materials need to be checked and matched with the order quantities. This check is of paramount importance as it affects the total inventory count in the warehouse and inventory planning can go awry if this count is not right. Most warehouses are performing this operation manually today. Apart from large time investments, manual processes are also susceptible to errors.

Falcon Autotech offers an automated goods receiving and reconciliation system, to ease the life of warehouse managers and operators by achieving high throughputs and accuracies.

Typically, the goods arrive in a carton from a supplier. At the inbound of the warehouse, cartons are counted manually, and their count is noted. The operators open each carton and verify the quantity and quality of the SKUs in them. The data is then entered in the system manually. While quality check may still require visual inspection and need manual intervention, quantity and SKU count can be automated using Falcon’s automated goods receiving and reconciliation system. We have designed an effective system where the SKU and unit count are achieved using the weight of each SKU and carton.

The system matches the full carton’s weight against the sum of each SKU weight from the database and the empty carton weight, to calculate the quantity of the SKU. The system reconciles the calculated quantities with the order quantities from the data available in the WMS/ERP. A reconciliation report is sent to the WMS/ERP.