Retailer Shelf-Life Allocation Board

In FMCG and consumer goods, a retailer's distribution center will often refuse stock that arrives with less than a set share of its shelf life left, and each retailer and distributor sets its own minimum. At the same time, some finished batches are still waiting on quality release. This MoveTheWheels concept illustrates a Shelf-Life Allocation board that brings the two together in the warehouse, so released stock goes to the orders whose rules it meets and the team sees early when an order depends on a batch that has not been released.

Without it, allocation is often worked out in a spreadsheet kept apart from the quality record. Older stock can be sent to a customer whose rule it no longer meets and come back as a rejection, or an order can wait on a held batch until the day it ships, when it is too late to split the shipment or warn the customer.

The illustration shows the board under Inventory for one plant's finished goods in a given week. Tiles count batches on QA hold, orders at shelf-life risk, batches released today and pallets near a customer's rule limit. An amber alert says that one sales order needs a held batch released by a stated time to meet its grocery customer's rule. A batch table lists batch, SKU with pack size, manufacture date, life left, QA status and allocation: an older batch steered to distributors only with a Below rule badge, a batch on micro hold with its result due time, reserved for the order at risk, batches allocated to pharmacy and distributor orders with Near rule limit and Released badges, and one unallocated batch. A Customer rules card lists the minimum life at receipt for a grocery distribution center, a pharmacy chain and distributors, and an Order at risk card gives the order's cases and ship time with Split shipment and Notify customer service buttons.

The concept is designed to work with two other Burdenoff products. Release and hold decisions, with each batch's manufacture date and shelf life, are designed to arrive from ManufacturedOps through a FluidGrids batch release automation, as chips in a card at the lower right note. MoveTheWheels is designed to keep each customer's rule, allocate released stock first-expiry-first-out to the orders whose rules it meets, steer batches below a customer's rule to channels that accept them and record every allocation change.