Hey there!
I just wanted to weigh in on this use case. I’ll be leaning on my personal experience in the pick/pack/ship areas that I’ve worked in throughout my past, so I may be a little off from what your specific operation is like without discussing your operation in more detail. There is a ton of opportunity in this space and I am glad that your request seems to focus on the foundational elements of this - certainly with Tulip we could explore further improvements such a pick-to-light or other forms of process optimization.
With that said - let me share how I would think of this. Long story short - I think the Job Module is the best data structure for this application. Essentially, your pickers are mobile workcenters, processing orders from a queue. This queue is likely coming from another information system such as your ERP, but from the picker standpoint they likely just have a pick ticket of some kind that represents what they should pick and what orders the item(s) relate to.
Eventually we’ll want to connect to this ERP but to start, let’s just ask that pickers scan their pick ticket information into a mobile device (or central terminal, your choice). Scanning this in should record that the pick ticket is with a given user. The ticket will be in an “In queue” status. Once picked, it will transition to “in progress” and finally, when delivered to the pack station, “complete”. This will vary depending on your operation but generally speaking, these pick tickets are being processed for the next stage.
At the pack station, we may be interested in making sure that all materials for a given customer order (all related pick tickets) are complete. This structure enables this, as well. Each user will represent and log the production in a workcenter - these could be divided into departments depending on your operation. For example, you may measure pickers differently than packing stations, or some stations/pickers may have different expectations depending on how you’ve organized things.
The jobs module can support all of this activity and produce the kind of dashboards you’re looking for. The UI will need to be tailored to meet the needs of your workers / operation but overall, the structure should give you the kind of visibility you are looking for.
If this sounds like the right direction please let me know and I’d be happy to help build this out - we could even add it to the library as an example for people in a similar position as yourself!
Here is a link to the job module support document. The Job module is the foundation of the work order tracking application:
Thanks
Mark
