Hi,

We're in the process of validating our LM performance numbers, and one of the issues that was highlighted was that the printer location where a picker gets their carton labels isn't coming through as the start of their activity. This is most noticeable in areas where we have only 1 aisle. For example, our Area 19 has only 1 aisle, but it has 60 bays. So if a picker finishes a task at bay 60, and their next task's first pick is at bay 30, they're only getting travel time from bay 60 back to bay 30. They need to get travel time from bay 60 back to bay 1 (where the printer is), and then back to bay 30.

I found in the LM Monitor Defaults screen, it lets me put in the assumed starting point of an activity, which would be the printer location for the given area. However, this only applies to the monitoring messages. How can I force the printer location to come through on the messaging? 

Say a user finished a task at location 1901-60A01, and their next task started at 1901-30A01. I'd want the messaging in the workinfo_q_dtl_010 to come through like this:

• Seq Nbr 1: 1901-60A01 (user's previous location)
• Seq Nbr 2: PRTR-AR019 (printer for area 19)
• Seq Nbr 3: 1901-30A01 (first pick on the current task)

Is there some config available in base wms that lets me do that? Or would I have to write another script?

Thanks for any insight.

Hi Dan,

We're using v2006. We do most of our picking using Vocollect, although there are occasions where we pick with the RF. The parameter you mentioned seems to be exactly what we need, but I don't see it listed in our VoiceOnly1 transactions. Can you tell me what position the parameter is in in your system? I've come across situations before where a parameter is actually available, but we just don't have it configured, and we don't have a documented list of all the available parameters so we have no way to know that it's available.

I see a checkbox parameter that says Create Anchor Carton Task, but I don't see a TranLink parameter where we specify the anchor carton transaction to use. Also, I'm not sure I understand how that would help, because anchoring would be done after the picking, which is long after the visit to the printer.

Thanks!

Thanks! I've configured that parameter in our VoiceOnly1 program. Whether or not it works is another question though - our Vocollect QA environment has conveniently decided to give us problems, so I haven't been able to test it yet. However, I do have another related question. How does it know what printer location to send through? E.g. when we start a task in Vocollect, it prompts us for the printer, and we might say something like "one seven" for printer 17. How does it take that input and somehow link that up to something that has the proper XYZ coordinates? I'm guessing that we'd have to have the printers configured as locations within the locn_hdr table... that part should be no problem. I could set them up to have locations something like PRTR-TEC17, but where would the link be to tell WMS that if Vocollect hears "one seven", it should send through location PRTR-TEC17, with its associated XYZs?

Also, while adding this parameter, I noticed that there was a big gap in the parameters in our version - we have a variety of parameters up to position 118, but then there's nothing until position 162. I don't know if this is by design, or if there's just a whole bunch of parameters available that we don't have configured.