32 DC VELOCITY JANUARY 2015 www.dcvelocity.com
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panies can set up packing workstations
in their stockrooms that are dedicated to
customer-direct orders.
Luther Webb sees it differently. Webb,
who is director of operations and solu-
tions consulting for the systems inte-
grator Intelligrated, believes that picking
should take place on the floor. “I don’t
think we’ll see backrooms keeping inven-
tory because the whole premise of fulfill-
ing online orders from the stores is taking
advantage of inventory the stores already
have,” he says. “To be honest, most retail
stores don’t have much of a backroom,
because with the just-in-time push that
occurred during the recent history of
the supply chain, the backroom got very
small.”
Instead, Webb sees backrooms focusing
on steps that come later in the process,
such as packing and shipping.
3. HOW ARE YOU GOING TO
MANAGE INVENTORY?
When it comes to keeping close tabs on
inventory, retail stores still have a long
way to go, according to Kim Baudry, market development director for Dematic, a
supplier of automated material handling
and logistics systems. Most stores don’t
know where a product is in the store or
backroom, or exactly how much they
have in stock, she says. That can create
difficulties when they go to fill online
orders.
In most of these cases, the solution
lies in software, says Baudry. “It’s similar
to what we tell our distribution center
customers,” she says. “You have to have
that basic foundation in place, which in
the case of a DC is a WMS [warehouse
management system] or inventory con-
trol system, so that you know what you’ve
received, where you’ve put it, when you’ve
picked it, and where you are shipping it
to. It’s the same thing for the backroom.”
The Tompkins report recommends
using a location-based inventory man-
agement solution for the backroom, cou-
pled with a distributed order manage-
ment (DOM) solution. DOM software
helps companies manage, monitor, and
optimize orders across all of their sales
channels. It provides a real-time view of
inventory and order status, and can help
Advisory Group (see “Study: To
excel at omnichannel distribution,
you need the right stuff,” November
2014). Chances are, the numbers will
only increase. But where exactly in
the store should order picking take
place?
Tompkins argues that online cus-
tomer-direct orders should be ful-
filled from the backroom, not from
the store floor. That’s partly because
store floor inventory information is
often inaccurate, he says. But it’s also
because he believes picking from the
backroom leads to a more efficient
picking/packing process since com-
