Speaker A
- Hey Tomasi. So you're the outbound manager here at our Las Vegas facility?
Explore the inbound warehouse operations at ShipHero's Las Vegas facility, focusing on receiving, inventory management, and load balancing.
Key Takeaways
- Inbound operations are crucial for smooth outbound fulfillment and require careful coordination.
- Stock is initially placed in overstock locations before replenishment moves it to pickable shelves.
- Effective team delegation and shift planning optimize handling of fluctuating workloads.
- Noncompliance in shipments is a major challenge that requires prompt communication and designated handling zones.
- Continuous replenishment is key to preventing picker delays and maintaining order flow.
Summary
- Inbound manager Tomasi explains daily receiving operations including handling trucks, assigning license plate numbers, and placing stock in overstock locations.
- The process starts with booking appointments for shipping plans (purchase orders), receiving products, and allocating them to appropriate locations.
- Inbound products are first placed in sellable but unpickable overstock locations before triggering replenishment to pickable shelves.
- Replenishment is managed proactively to ensure pickers always have stock, minimizing delays in outbound order fulfillment.
- Team management involves planning shifts based on freight schedules, balancing receiving, load balancing, inventory control, and replenishment tasks.
- First shift focuses on receiving and staging products, while second shift supports ongoing replenishment to maintain outbound flow.
- Noncompliant shipments cause delays; items are moved to designated flex zones after two days to free dock space while awaiting resolution.
- Communication with warehouse account managers (WAMs) and customers is critical to resolving noncompliance issues.
- Tomasi emphasizes the importance of keeping the dock clear and continuously feeding the outbound process.
- Favorite ShipHero feature mentioned is 'the hospital,' likely a tool for managing exceptions or issues.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
- Inbound manager, so what I do--
Speaker A
- Let's start over.
Speaker A
(laughs) (upbeat jazzy music) Tomasi, Inbound Manager, Las Vegas facility. What does that mean? What's your role?
Speaker A
- So what we do is we do the day-to-day operations and receiving. So anything that comes in from trucks, basically receive it, make sure it gets its license plate number.
Speaker A
Then it goes to one of our overstock locations, whether it’s B, C, or D. From there it triggers replenishment and then we replenish the product.
Speaker A
A little bit of what else we do is load balance as well. So we send out to our other facilities, balance out our inventory.
Speaker A
- Let's talk about the lifecycle. Let's talk about the process, when a, what we call an SP, shipping plan, people call 'em purchase orders.
Speaker A
So purchase order is created by the customer. There's a date scheduled. The inbound team books an appointment for when it's gonna show up, right?
Speaker A
Then it shows up at the dock. Then your team gets involved, right?
Speaker A
- Yes, so basically what would happen is we have the shipping plans, purchase orders that come in.
Speaker A
That come hit our docks. As soon as they hit our docks, we open these purchase plans and then we basically go from looking and seeing what product we have, how many we have backordered, whatever the case may be for that specific shipping plan.
Speaker A
We basically receive the stock in, make sure whether it's allocated to the RSP, RSC, whatever receiving stores location that we have.
Speaker A
And then from there we put it into overstock. It's a sellable location so that now it triggers and allocates orders so that we can get it replenished.
Speaker A
- Yeah, so let's break it down. Let's go a little slower. So product shows up.
Speaker A
First, we make sure it's the right product.
Speaker A
- Yes.
Speaker A
- Phase one. Phase two, the system tells us how many we want to receive in this building and how many we want to cross dock to another building.
Speaker A
- A hundred percent.
Speaker A
- Right?
Speaker A
- Yes.
Speaker A
- So once we do that, the inbound product, for the most part, goes to overstock.
Speaker A
We don't take new product and put it directly on the pickable shelves. We put them into sellable, but unpickable locations in the—
Speaker A
- Overstock location.
Speaker A
- That's step one?
Speaker A
- Yeah, step one, yep.
Speaker A
- And then how do we know, how does your team know to take some of that stock from the pallet racks and put it in the pickable shelves?
Speaker A
- So that will then trigger a replenishment. So you can do it one of two ways.
Speaker A
Once we get the shipping plan, we can look and see what's backordered and then from there we can know like, okay, we're gonna move these RSPs, RSCs, whatever they are strictly straight into a pickable location.
Speaker A
- Got it, so if a PO shows up or an SP shows up, and you have a backorder for let's say 20 units, instead of putting it in overstock and then waiting for the replenishment report to tell you to put it away there,
Speaker A
you'll just take 20, or maybe you'll take 40 'cause you know you're gonna need more and put it straight in pickable and then take the other ones and tag them to go up into the dock, into the—
Speaker A
- Overstock location.
Speaker A
- Overstock locations.
Speaker A
And then when you think about how to divide your team, so you got receiving, load balance, which is both load balancing off of SPs that came in as well as pulling from the shelves.
Speaker A
- Pulling from the shelves.
Speaker A
- You've got inventory control, you got replenishment, where you gotta stock the pickable shelves for the pickers.
Speaker A
How do you think about limited number of people, some days are busy. How do you manage that?
Speaker A
- So basically what I'll do is I'll just plan the day out. Like if I know on our calendar, we have a Google calendar which tells us what freights we got coming.
Speaker A
So I'll look at that and see through the day, through the week, through the month and just kind of play it by that.
Speaker A
See what we have coming in, how many people I know I'm gonna have in receiving, then how many tour operators I'm gonna have to put these into overstock locations.
Speaker A
So it all depends 'cause sometimes we could walk in replenishment a lot. Replenishment might not be a lot one day, but we might have a lot of receiving.
Speaker A
So it's kind of like delegating everybody into those different types of departments I guess you could say in inbound where it's like, okay, you're gonna work on load balance today.
Speaker A
We need to get a truck out to ABE this Friday, or whatever the case may be.
Speaker A
So it's really just delegating the employees in inbound to make sure that we have enough everywhere.
Speaker A
- And how do you think about what you wanna do during first shift versus the second shift?
Speaker A
- So my biggest goal, like when I get in, is everything that we got coming in, I wanna receive it.
Speaker A
I wanna make sure that it has a license plate number whether it’s in staging location and then we get it up into the racks just so that all the orders, whatever orders we have backorders can allocate for those.
Speaker A
And we get the replenishment and get it all out the door. 'Cause the main goal is to make sure that outbound is moving.
Speaker A
So whatever we get in, I wanna make sure we're proactively looking at it like, okay, we got these backorders.
Speaker A
We need to make sure that we put these products out so that we can get the pickers to pick 'em and then we just keep stocking it through.
Speaker A
- And normally if pickers say that they're not pulling up orders, we always say it's probably your fault.
Speaker A
- It's probably replenishment, yep, a hundred percent. So I literally, so we have a thing here where it's like I tell Ryan all the time if the pickers are telling us that we're not pulling the orders or he's telling me that, I know it's a replenishment.
Speaker A
So the biggest thing for me is to make sure that I always look at anything that's coming in on SPs that we have that.
Speaker A
And then as far as replenishment goes, we always just try to keep it under 10 and make sure that we're cruising through it.
Speaker A
- Yeah, constantly feeding the outbound machine.
Speaker A
- A hundred percent, a hundred percent.
Speaker A
- All right, what is, I know things don't always go perfect. So what are the biggest problems that you face in your role?
Speaker A
- Biggest problem might be something might come in noncompliant and it may, as soon as they hit it to our dock, we might get some of it in and then it's like it'll allocate the orders, but we still receive some other stuff.
Speaker A
But some of the stuff might be noncompliant. Sit in, we gotta wait to make sure we're reaching out to the customer through our WAM and getting that situated and then those might sit for maybe a day, maybe a week.
Speaker A
We don't really know. So a lot of that is a little bit of frustration 'cause it's like when you get something in, you want to get it going.
Speaker A
You wanna get it off your dock. So it's like my biggest goal is always make sure the dock is empty.
Speaker A
Whatever's on the dock it's accounted for.
Speaker A
- Right. Okay, so you sort of halfway through, you try to scan something.
Speaker A
Doesn't scan or it's damaged or it doesn't match the SP. So then you gotta pause.
Speaker A
And you got all this stock on the dock. The WAMs are warehouse account managers.
Speaker A
You ask him or her to like, hey, talk to the customer.
Speaker A
- See what's going on.
Speaker A
Tell me what to do. And then the product's still sitting on the dock at that point, right?
Speaker A
At what point do you say it's been a while. I need to get, I need this lane, I need this dock space.
Speaker A
I'm gonna move this somewhere else, tag it as noncompliant so I get my dock space back?
Speaker A
- So we basically got like four flex zones next to our receiving area so that we put our non-compliant there.
Speaker A
So whether it sits longer than two, I give it two days. If it sits longer than two days on a dock, I move it straight over to our flex zones, which are non-compliant zones.
Speaker A
Then I'm kind of relying on our receiving team, myself as well, to make sure that we're reaching out, following up.
Speaker A
Hey, just a courtesy follow-up, what's going on with this? Just to make sure it doesn't sit in that non-compliance zone longer than it needs to be.
Speaker A
- What's your favorite feature in ShipHero?
Speaker A
- The hospital. It it, you know like whe
Speaker A
So when we got here, it was me and when Ryan got here it's really just delegating the fact of making sure that we had this approach where it was like we're gonna designate these areas for certain things.
Speaker A
We're gonna clean up our dock. We're gonna put our shelving up, make sure these customers have their inventory here, certain places, you know.
Speaker A
So a lot has changed. I think the biggest thing is getting the inventory corrected, cycle counting the building our full audit and really just taking ownership of our inventory.
Speaker A
I think that was the thing that I was kind of pulling teeth with when I first got here.
Speaker A
It was like trying to figure out what do we have here in the building.
Speaker A
And to say a year from now till now, it's like we've came a long way.
Speaker A
I can actually say like if I send someone to a location, I know some, I know it's there, you know?
Speaker A
- So good inventory visibility. - Yeah, a hundred percent. - So what do you, what do you wanna see improve from now till a year from now?
Speaker A
- Honestly, just start, just continue to build off of what we got going here.
Speaker A
I think the biggest thing is we're making strides and making room for everything. So we have a lot more customers we're planning to get in so I wanna make sure that we have the capacity to have that like we're getting containers left and right.
Speaker A
So really just building off of keeping our inventory accurate and then having that space to always keep the customers bringing their product in.
Speaker A
- And if you can help train a new person stepping into the the role of inventory manager for the first time or inbound manager for the first time, what would you tell 'em?
Speaker A
- I would tell 'em keep a level head and continue to just work through it.
Speaker A
Inventory never ends so you're not gonna get it all in one shot. So it's something that, it's steady evolving.
Speaker A
It's always something new. So just keep a level head and just continue to work at it.
Speaker A
And it's honestly, it's really like a competition really with yourself, trying to make sure that every day you're gonna find something new.
Speaker A
Every day things might not go the way they did yesterday. So just keep a level head.
Speaker A
That's what I say. - And the building's definitely improved in the time. You've been here, Ryan's been here.
Speaker A
I think the team solidified, we've got some good stability and we've got some really good team members and the results show.
Speaker A
Thank you, you're doing great. - Thank you. - Appreciate it.
Topics:warehouse inboundShipHeroinventory managementreceiving processreplenishmentload balancingwarehouse operationspurchase ordersnoncompliance handlinglogistics
