Multiple Stocking Units of Measure Wing Yip "Mother & Son" Case Study
Wing Yip is widely recognised as the UK's leading Chinese and Oriental supplier with stores and a national distribution network supplying Chinese restaurants and take-aways throughout the country. An established family business, Wing Yip has an impressive network of Far Eastern suppliers and manufacturers and sells a vast range of authentic goods and produce within its superstores, to the catering trade as well as the general public. The Group's head office is based in Birmingham as are its warehousing and national distribution centre.
Wing Yip originally implemented CSfD's food distribution system in 1996 and has since worked in close partnership to upgrade and develop the system to support their highly successful expanding business.
Stocking units of measure
Any warehouse management system (WMS) needs to control the movement and storage of items within a warehouse, or distribution type facility. The core functionality provided within these systems has not fundamentally changed for many decades and the basic logic will use a combination of item, location, quantity, unit of measure and order information. But in order to service increasingly sophisticated customer demands, WMS have come into their own, providing an increasingly varied and complex range of additional functionality.
Like quality and customer service, maintaining inventory accuracy is equally important and the facility to use multiple stocking units of measure has become a common feature of the modern WMS. One of the key advantages of this functionality is the ability to manage the sale, purchase and costing of individual items across different sales channels, for example, wholesale, supermarket and web site. It also allows a company to closely track inventory costs, which in turn helps to improve overall profitability.
In its most basic format, stocking units of measure can be defined as products defined with any number of units of measure where automated conversions between units can take place. In addition to holding stock and placing orders in any unit of measure, each unit can have its weight and volume details stored against it too.
Mother & Son
The standard system originally used by Wing Yip supported two different units of product stock: case (or outer) and single unit. Due to the nature of Wing Yip's business, selling as a supermarket and as a wholesaler, this proved insufficient. A modification was undertaken to introduce multiple stocking units of measure and to create a product relationship that Wing Yip chose to define as 'mother' and 'son'.
Bought by case sold by weight
Another example where the mother & son relationship can be applied is for items bought by case but sold by weight. Here the conversion factor is set as the number of Kg's that make up the unit of the mother. A typical example of this would be in meat or certain fish products.
A side of beef (mother) may be sent to the butcher to be chopped up into individual steaks. A number of these steaks may then be combined and sold as a tray of steaks (son). The conversion factor would be set as the number of Kg's that make up a unit of the mother.
More than one mother
Where legal requirements on food traceability do not dictate otherwise, it is possible for the son to have two mothers. For example, lemon grass bought by the case (mother) may come from different suppliers. The lemon grass may then be sold as single units or be prepacked into small bags (son). There is no restriction on the number of sons that a mother may have.
Differing scenarios
It is possible to set up the mother and son relationship under a number of differing scenarios. For example, the mother may be weighted and the son not, the son may be weighted and the mother not, both can be weighted or neither of them. It is also possible for the son to be expressed as a fraction of the mother.
Benefits
Apart from flexibility within their system to cater for mutiple sales channels, prior to the introduction of mother & son Wing Yip had found that they were losing money on high value weighted items. The reason for this was that they lacked a suitable audit trail from goods inwards of the mother item to despatch of the son or single units. The creation of mother & son relationships helped to provide that missing information. The system also has the flexibility where the order for weighted products is not an exact case to split the order into case and units and provide the operator with the flexibility to price by either quantity. Where the son is a fraction of the mother, the sale will be processed but the stock sold will be held as stock residue until a unit of the multiple is reached, when stock held on the mother will be adjusted.
Future
In the future, Wing Yip are considering the introduction of functionality to cater for kits. For example, plastic containers are received as two individual items, box and lid, that then need to be assembled as a single item prior to despatch. The concept of kits is functionality that CSfD already provides to a number of its other customers.
