In wholesale distribution, a “case cube” is a measurement of how much volume, or space, a case of a given item will take up in the warehouse.
Examples of the uses of Cube data include:
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- Planning and sizing the physical warehouse
- Warehouse equipment selection such as pallets and forklifts
- Pick vehicle selection – the cart selection should be a function of the required capacity
- Truck loading – case cube data can be used to calculate how many pallets are required to fill a truck, and the crewing needs and load time required to load or unload the truck
- With Acumatica Distribution Edition there are multiple methods to track cube information.
Method #1: Boxes
In Acumatica, box dimensions are configured specific to a particular shipping carrier’s requirements.
Once boxes are defined, users have the ability to specify one or more automatic packaging settings for a SKU.
When a shipment is created boxes will be added to the shipment automatically if that option is configured on the SKUs. Alternatively, users can manually add one or more boxes as needed.
In the situation where the shipping unit corresponds to the case cube, the packaging information may provide all that is needed.
Method #2: Attributes
In some situations there is a need to have greater control over the cube size independent of the shipping boxes and packages. In this case, we can use the extremely flexible Acumatica “attributes” functionality to keep track of this information.
The first step is to create four new attributes in Acumatica. In this example we will add attributes for the cube length, width, and height, as well as the qty per cube.
Once these attributes are defined, they are available for display and calculations throughout the system, including reports, generic inquiries, and printed forms.
Here is an example of a Packing List that incorporates cube information. To calculate the number of cubes, the three dimensions of the cube are multiplied and then divided by 1728.
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