New Features: Palletisation

A major focus for the second half of this year has been getting the palletisation and GS1 barcoding features underway in Consignly.

Stage 1 saw us releasing additional properties on a product to support an extended selection of data requirements (such as Best Before Date, Production Date etc) that will allow us to create GS1-standard barcodes containing this information.

Stage 2 is underway and so far, our engineering team have built in support for organisations to configure GS1 labelling properties for their Client Partners.  This will enable SSCC generation on palletised products for Client Partners that are part of the GS1 standard.

We've also engineered the ability for product to be palletised either manually or automatically.
Automatic palletisation will take all the unpalletised goods line on a consignment and automatically split them into pallets, with the appropriate quantity of a product on each pallet.

We've invested significant time into building a user experience that makes this process easy.  Configuration of the make-up of product on a pallet is intuitive, with users being able to drag and drop lines onto a pallet.
Manual pallet configuration is also possible, and achieved through a similar approach.

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In addition to this, Consignly will have the unique ability to support consignments containing both palletised and unpalletised items.  This means organisations that prefer to work using unpalletised processes can continue to do so, whilst organisations that will like to take advantage of palletisation and pallet tracking can do so, whilst at the same time being able to support unpalletised items.

This unique melding of supporting both palletised and unpalletised processes simultaneously will allow organisations the flexibility to deal with scenarios such as moving damaged items off pallets into damages areas within the warehouse, without requiring product to be repalletised.

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Consignly will support re-using existing pallet labels that might have been supplied on inbound pallets into a warehouse, meaning that relabelling of pallets on the way in may not be necessary.  This support extends to SSCC barcodes as well as Pallet Ids and Handling Units generated by other systems.

For pallets that aren't labelled, Consignly will have the ability to generate SSCC labels if the Client Partner is GS1 supported, or if not then Consignly will generate Pallet Ids using our own approach.

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Right now, the engineering team are hard at work on the receive process, crafting the experience to be intuitive and easy to use.  We're introducing the ability to receive some product and upgrade its information to define batch number, expiry dates, and other information as the product are received, which will help when properties of a product such as batch number are required for storage but are unknown at the time of consignment creation.

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We're excited to be on our way to releasing Stage 2 very soon, and look forward to talking about the next stage of this major project shortly after.

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