An unloading is the act of unloading the goods WITHOUT receiving them.
It allows the goods to be declared as “unloaded” and “awaiting reception”. It also makes it easier to digitize the unloading and the Convention on the Contract for the International Carriage of Goods by Road information stage.
The act of unloading is relevant when the reception of goods is tedious (e.g.: reception of multi-reference pallets, repackaging of products, important control tasks on the arrival of goods….). It is also relevant when the teams in reception / storage are few.
We can thus distinguish what is waiting to arrive in the warehouse (and in the process of being delivered), from what has already arrived in the warehouse and is waiting to be received.
For this last point, this allows us to prioritize the computerized reception act according to the “criticality” of the unloaded merchandise: “container” of the expected merchandise, age of the unloading, name of the third parties associated with the unloading…
The act of unloading, if it is well managed, also makes it possible to use the reception docks as a buffer while waiting to have the necessary time to receive the most priority goods. This makes it possible to smooth out the load.
EGO, our WMS solution, offers to manage 3 levels of priority for goods awaiting reception:
a “normal” flow of goods that does not require anticipation,
a more “tense” flow requiring a smoothing of the load and an anticipation of the means (and the management of an appointment schedule by the carriers)
and finally, for “very tense” flows, for arrivals that cannot be anticipated or that prevent reception as they come in.
This way, the right resources are allocated to the right issues and not all goods receipts are placed in the same category. Clever, isn’t it?