DHL’s Smart Fulfillment Tasking System Nominated for 2020 Innovation Award

Warehouse fulfillment is getting more complex with smaller orders and tighter cut off times. In this post, you will learn how we addressed this economically with the help of SAP WM.

Per the diagram below, our solution imports open orders from SAP to our new tasking system called “Idea”.

From here, the warehouse planner would have visibility to orders by priority, type, transport mode and zone.  The screen below shows open pick tasks by type and warehouse area.  Allowing the warehouse wave planner to split out single vs multi-item orders (which can be picked differently) and create tasks that will have minimal travel distances.

Optimization is next, strategically clustering orders together onto pick carts to reduce travel distance.  The diagram below shows, is a task sheet that includes 5 orders and 10 pick lines.  Notice how all the picks are concentrated in just two aisles.

After, the generated tasks are sent back to SAP for execution as it remains the system of record.

In summary, this is a economical approach to add optimization logic into a warehouse operation with minimal integration and no additional hardware and automation.  We do this by leveraging SAP’s core WM module for communication, inventory management,

We are now honored to have our entry “IDEA: DHL’s Integrated Tasking System using Advanced Analytics to Optimize Fulfillment with SAP” accepted as a SAP 2020 Innovation Award nominee: https://www.sap.com/idea-place/sap-innovation-awards/submission-details-2020.html?idea_id=1030