Unit of Measure in WMS

Oracle WMS Cloud supports four units of measure:

  • CASE: Cases refer to physical boxes (must define “Standard Case Quantity”).
  • PACK: Cases can be further broken down into Packs (must define “Standard Pack Quantity”).
  • UNIT: The smallest unit of measure is Units, which represents an ‘each’.
  • LPN: LPNs are the largest UOMs in the system, and can have multiple meanings.

If each box is labeled with an LPN, the LPN represents a physical box.

If an entire pallet is labeled with an LPN, the LPN represents a pallet.

The LPN has an attribute called “LPN is Pallet”, which systematically marks the LPN as a physical Pallet. The advantages of using this functionality is that pallets will only require one label (LPN) and can be allocated into Pallet, Cases, Packs or Units.

LPNs can only be set to “LPN is Pallet” during receiving. You must use a receiving RF module (either “Receive LPN Shipment” or “Receive LPN Load”) and configure its “pallet-handling” module parameter to “LPN as Physical Pallet”. With this setting, any LPN received with this Pallet will have the “LPN is Pallet” flag set to true.

LPN as a Pallet

There are two ways to treat the LPN as a Pallet:

  1. Using “LPN is Pallet” flag: LPNs have an optional flag that mark the containers as pallets.
  2. Without using the “LPN is Pallet” flag: LPNs do not use the flag, but physically the pallets are labeled with LPNs.

While option two is easier as it does not require special configuration (the user tricks WMS by systematically using LPNs but physically using pallets), it is has limited visibility.

The main difference is that you cannot define the ‘standard pallet quantity’ with option two while this is possible with option one.

Setting up the "LPN is Pallet" flag to true for LPNs

As stated above, using option one requires extra configuration. You can only set the LPN’s “LPN is Pallet” flag to “TRUE” during receiving via a receiving RF module with special parameters configured. To configure this:

  1. Go to the “Screens Configuration” screen.
  2. Create a new “Receiving LPN Shipment” or “Receiving LPN Load” RF module.
  3. Select this record and click on its details.
  4. Modify the “pallet-handling” flag and set it to “LPN as Physical Pallet”.
  5. Now, every LPN that is received with this special RF module will have the “LPN is Pallet” flag enabled.

Additionally, you must also define the standard pallet quantity in the Item master. To do so:

  1. Go to the “Items” screen.
  2. Select the item record and click on its details.
  3. Click “Edit” to begin editing.
  4. Populate the following fields:
    1. Standard Pack Quantity (optional)
    2. Standard Case Quantity
    3. LPNs per Tier
    4. Tiers per Pallet
  5. Click Save.
Note: Step 4 above is used to define the standard pallet quantity by specifying how many units there are in a case (Standard Case Quantity), and how many cases there are in a pallet (LPNs per Tier & Pallets per Tier).

You can view the “LPN is Pallet” column in the “IBLPNs” screen.