Consolidating Expired Items

All the perishable items are bound to expire. All the expired items present in the bins at the warehouse need to be cleared off at regular intervals and segregated from non-expired items.

A batch gets expired, in the following ways:

• Each day, at regular intervals, a cron job will run which will simply mark all the batches as expired for which the expiry date has passed.

• Through OMS, a user can manually mark a batch as expired (even before the actual expiration date of the batch).

As soon as a batch (say Batch-X) is marked as expired in OMS following things will happen:

• All the picklists created for the expired batch (Batch-X) for QC pass orders will be cancelled (as the inventory will move to QC fail post expiry picking)

• All the QC pass orders that are not yet packed and contain order items (previously allocated from Batch-X’s inventory) will be tried to re-allocate from some other, non-expired batch’s inventory. If an inventory is available the order remains FULFILLABLE, otherwise, the order becomes UNFULFILLABLE.

• For B2B orders, all the Items added to a Box and still not packed need to be removed from the Pack Box using the Remove Items From Outward Box screen. For more information, please refer to the Remove Items From Outward Box Screen.

For consolidation of expired items, a special kind of picking needs to be done at warehouses which will facilitate picking up the Live items from the bins and mark them as expired. As soon as an item is picked up through this type of picking, the item status moves to EXPIRY_RECYCLE and item QC is changed to FAIL, with EXPIRED as the QC reason.

⚠️ Note: Once the item is marked as EXPIRED, the QC (status or reason) of the item cannot be changed.

Please follow the following steps to identify and pick the expired items in the warehouse for segregation purposes:

1. Refer to the EXPIRED BATCH Report to identify the batches that are expired in ASSURE.

2. Note down the Batch ID from the above report and refer to the BATCH BASED PICKING REPORT to find out the Aisle ID where the picker needs to go to pick the items.
   The report shows all the aisles where the items of the Batch ID provided as input are present, with information of count of Live items already in the EXPIRED state and NON-EXPIRED state in that aisle.

3. Based on the information shown by the BATCH PICKING REPORT, a picker can decide the aisle in which he wants to start the expiry based picking. 

4. Once the picker has reached an Aisle, he can open the Pick Expired Items screen in WMS and follow the remaining steps as demonstrated to do the guided picking of the items.

   1. Enter the Batch ID.

   2. Scan the Location ID.

   3. The Pick suggestion along with SKU data and Batch details will be displayed on the User Interface.

   4. On picking the Item successfully, the system will suggest the next item to be picked.

   5. In case the suggested item is not available, the user can mark it as Not Found similar to the piece and bulk picking process. Here, all the items in the Bin for the suggested SKU and the Batch will be marked as lost.

Figure 10.1: Pick Expired Items screen in WMS                       Figure 10.2: Not found option for picking expired Items

A picker can directly put all the items picked during the expiry based picking in a QC Fail bin at  Recycle desk and later on put away the fail bin in an aisle where expired items are kept.

It is strongly recommended to put away the Expired items in a different Aisle location where the non-expired items are not kept. In this way, the entire Expired Items picking process will become more smooth and organized.

⚠️ Note: During the picking suggestions in Pick Expired Items Screen in WMS, already expired items will also be shown in suggestion to pick.