Lot management | Blocking lots

As a merchant selling regulated products like cosmetics or food supplements, quality control is a critical part of your operations. Whether it’s to ensure consumer safety or stay compliant with regulations, managing product quality at every stage of your supply chain can be complex. This is where the Block Lot feature in the Bigblue app comes into play. It allows you to block lots of products from being picked while undergoing quality control. This article will walk you through using the Block Lot feature to manage quality with minimal disruption.

What Is the Block Lot Feature?

• Key Benefits
• When Should You Use Block Lot?

How to Block a Lot?

• 1. Blocking from Inbound Shipments
• 2. Blocking Existing Lots

Impact on Warehouse Operations

Handy Feature to Ensure Consistent Quality Control

What Is the Block Lot Feature?

The Block Lot feature is designed to help you manage product lots that need to undergo quality checks without slowing down your entire operation. It lets you block specific lots of products from being picked during the time they are under quality inspection, without impacting other inventory in the warehouse.

Key Benefits:

• Autonomous control: You can block and unblock lots directly from the app.
• Immediate effectivity: Blocking is automatically communicated to the warehouse and integrates with their workflows.
• Minimal disruption: You can comply with regulations and handle quality concerns without significant delays to your operations.

When Should You Use Block Lot?

Typically, you'll want to block lots for quality control in two scenarios:

1. After production (but before reception): If a batch of products has left production but is awaiting a quality check before being stowed/put in stock.
2. Sanitary emergency: if customer feedback require further investigations or recalling the lot and you need to immediately stop selling it.

In either case, the goal is to prevent potentially faulty products from being sold, while minimizing disruptions to your inventory and orders.

How to Block a Lot?

There are two main ways to block a lot using the Bigblue app: through Inbound Shipments and from the Inventory Page. The actions you need to make depend on where your products are physically:

• Your products are on the way to the warehouse or not yet received in the inventory → Blocking from Inbound Shipments
• Your products are stowed in inventory → Blocking Existing Lots

1. Blocking from Inbound Shipments

You can block a lot directly from the Inbound Shipment page when the shipment is still in the editable stage (before offloading begins). Once offloading starts, you’ll need to block the product from the inventory instead. For more details, refer to Section 2: Blocking Existing Lots below.

To do so:

• Go to the Create/Edit Inbound page.
• When adding a product with lot tracking enabled, you'll be able to edit the lot details in a modal. Here, you can set the lot code, expiry date, and the status of the lot (whether it’s blocked or sellable).

Once you mark this product as blocked, the information is immediately transmitted to the warehouse. Physically, the operators will continue with the product reception process (counting, quality control) and place the products in a location flagged in the system as "Unavailable." Until you provide new instructions, this location will remain blocked, and products stored there cannot be added to orders.

2. Blocking Existing Lots

You can also block lots that are already in your inventory from the Inventory Page:

• Find the product with the lot number you want to block.

• Click on the product to open a modal where you can provide blocking details.
  • Blocking details are mandatory to ensure that the reason for the block is recorded, making it easier to understand the context when unblocking.

• Once you click "Block", the request is immediately transmitted to the warehouse, and within 10 minutes, the lot will appear as blocked in your app.

Impact on Warehouse Operations

While the Block Lot feature offers significant advantages in ensuring product quality, it does have some important implications for your warehouse operations:

• Picking logic: If a lot is blocked, it is removed from available inventory and can’t be picked for outgoing orders. This could lead to delays in fulfilling orders, as it requires unforecasted replenishments and inventory movements.
• FEFO adjustments: Blocking a lot may trigger changes in the First Expired, First Out (FEFO) logic. If you're blocking products close to their expiry date, it could lead to reshuffling of stock and manual intervention in the warehouse, increasing preparation time.
• Merchant-Controlled Unblocking: It's important to note that warehouses cannot unblock a lot on their own. This ensures that the Merchant's decision to block a lot cannot be bypassed, providing an additional layer of security and control over your inventory. As a result, any product marked as blocked will remain secure until it is properly reviewed or handled by authorized personnel.

Handy Feature to Ensure Consistent Quality Control

Blocking a lot is usually a simple process, but there’s one particularly handy feature to be aware of:

Inbound Shipments with Conflicting Lot Information

If you block a lot in an inbound shipment but a similar lot already exists in the warehouse, the incoming lot will take precedence, and all similar lots will be blocked once the new lot is received. This ensures that you’re consistently handling all products of the same batch with the same quality control measures.