Currently, in the inventory moves of customer shipment, the automatic assignation is a basic process (that could be extended indeed) taking stock following an alphabetical order of the locations.
I mean, i need 5000 products X. Let’s say i’ve : 3000 X in location B, 5000 X in location E.Assignation will loop in my locations, taking 3000 in location B and then 2000 in location E. Easy.
Indeed, assignation process can be extended to take care of FIFO, or searching for exact quantity…
But sometimes, a human choice is better than an automatic process. Tryton allows user to decide which location he will take stock if he prefers not use automatic assignation. But this process is quite fastidious, user has to split lines if quantity is distributed on multiple locations, user could choose a wrong location, …
So, a wizard could suggest for a product and a quantity to ship, a list of locations with this product available and the quantities… user choose which locations he will pick product and original line in inventory moves is updated with selected locations in wizard and correct quantities…
In our case, this manual selection is more complex because a same product could have different packaging (box of 1000, bulk unit, bag of 10 Kg, …) following provider (and those packaging are not always the same) but product is still the same so we add this “packaging” information as extra data in the lot. So when choosing a product for an order, user try to find the best packaging for the customer order… So this extra information could be added to the stock selection wizard for helping user to do the best choice.
Here’s an example:
We have a product A . (1Kg = 600 units)
- Location 1 : 5000 product A (packaging box of 1000)
- Location 4: 3000 product A (boxes of 1 Kg -> 5 boxes)
- Location 6 : 8000 product A (barrel of 8000 units bulk)
Following customer order, (quantity and packaging wished by customer (suggested by the commercial people following our stocks)) , stock user will try to pick the product at the location to have less handling…
If customer order 3 Kg of product A, it’s better to pick product at location 4…
If customer asks for 2 boxes of 1000 product A, location 1 is the best.
And another case, would be customer ask for 2400 units of product A (doesn’t care about packaging):
Maybe it’s easier to take 2 boxes of 1000 at location 1 and then 400 units at location 6… or taking 2400 at location 6…
This could be more complex if we have to take care of Fifo, or keeping lots together, or prevent to sell product from specific supplier… (could be weird )
If we have not enough stock following packaging, we can open packaging in other locations to sell bulk products or doing “re-packaging” to suit customer order.
So this selection wizard is helping stock user to do the right choice (but it’s a human choice depending a lot factors) that could be very complex to implement in an automatic assignation method…
Are you facing this problem? Maybe it’s only linked to our business…
Maybe we are bad handling this “packaging” and stock assignation problem ?
Thanks for comments!