The Pack Bench in the eFulfilment system is the “gate way” for all orders, irrespective of whether the order is paper picked, single order picked, wave picked or any other process used. All orders pass through the “Pack bench” where initially the product and quantity is confirmed. Prior to despatch manifests, delivery notes, returns labels, address and courier labels are automatically produced and applied.

Using either a desktop PC or tablet device, the Pack Bench functionality will present the order details, and utilise barcode scanning (or manual confirmation) to validate the products and quantities.

The Pack Bench has the ability to:
- capture the actual package weight
- manage which products are packed into which box
- generate packing lists
- generate address labels
- generate the courier labels when linked to courier systems.

Packing Without Picking

In many businesses where the products are small then the “Warehouse” resembles more of a “Stock Room” where all of the products can be seen and almost reached from the “Packing Bench”. In these scenarios, there is little point in actually forcing a Pick Process as the reality is that the operator is working from a list and they Pick and Pack the product as a single exercise.

eFulfilment can complete this process – the order lines to be picked and packed are displayed on the Pack Screen without the need to first complete an Order Pick. The operator can see the list of products to be picked, and will physically pick the product from the shelf, bring it to the pack bench, then scan to confirm that they have the correct product. This “Scan” validates the product and confirms the pick and pack process in one action.

Product Validation

The Pack Bench uses 2 techniques to validate the product being shipped is correct. Where there is a barcode on the product, this is used to confirm that correct product is being shipped. Where there are multiple quantities of the same product the user can either scan each item in any sequence, or they are prompted to enter a quantity count.

Where barcodes are not on the product, an image is displayed to show the operator the correct product.

Box Content List - Manifest/Advice Notes

As product is being packed, the process records the contents placed in each box. With a multi box order during packing items can be moved between boxes with each moved recorded, of which product from the order is placed into each box.

Box Unpack

The nature of Packing multi-box orders efficiency is that during the packing process, the packer will occasionally require to unpack and repack certain boxes. This is achieved by the Unpack function which simply records the move at a press of the unpack button.

Manifest / Advice Note / Packing List

Having packed all the products into boxes, the system will generate an advice note, together with an address label, and Returns label for each box. Where required weights can be entered or calculated and couriers booked and courier labels produced.

Packing Single Line Orders (SKU)

Single line, single product orders are a very specific type of order, which Datalinx eFulfilment has developed a special picking routine to manage which can provide significant cost savings. This is particularly beneficial for businesses where this type of order represents in excel of 50% of the total company orders received.

These orders are a very specific, they have a single line and a quantity of one SKU. These can be grouped together to form a Wave Pick all of their own, picking maybe 30 or 40 products (orders) at a time. These products are all placed into the same tote or trolly and passed to the Pack Bench.

At the Pack Bench, the SOSL packing in selected, the first product is taken out of the Tote (in any order) and the product ID is scanned, using this product ID the first order waiting to be shipped is found and the pack bench will ship this product/order.