In this blog, the fourth in a series of seven about the April release (full release notes here), we’re going to have a good look at the way Brightpearl handles inventory locations within each warehouse. Locations such as Aisle, Bay, Shelf, Bin - or even as simple as “upstairs” and “downstairs”. If you'd like to use location management and aren't yet doing so, I suggest you have a look at our documentation.
First of all, some background. There are three levels of location management; you choose which you want to use at Setup::Products/Inventory.
1. No location tracking
Does what it says on the tin! You can still have multiple warehouses, but there’s no location management within each warehouse.
2. Standard
This is by far and away the most popular method of tracking inventory location. Each item is given one location within each warehouse. Every delivery of that item is assigned to that location. If you want to move items around within the warehouse, all current inventory of that item is moved; this is the “product default location” and you set it on the product edit screen. You can have a different location for each warehouse; so for example in Warehouse A an item would live in A.02.4.A and in Warehouse B, you'd have it in UPPER.B.4
3. Multi-concurrent
This is where it gets more complicated. Every time you receive goods into the warehouse, you choose which location that consignment is added to. It means that a single product line can actually be spread about within your warehouse. This option makes location management a fair bit more time consuming, but once you have it dialled you can make more use of limited warehouse space. As this method requires extra steps with everything you do with inventory, I'd suggest you give our sales or support team a call before deciding to embark on this level of inventory management.
One of the new features this release is “inventory consolidation” - which is relevant only if you’re on the standard location management setting. Previously, if you changed a product default location and then received more goods, the database actually contained items in both the old location (from previous deliveries) and the new location. This sometimes prevented stock corrections where the system didn’t think you had enough on-hand stock in the selected location. Now, when you change the default location of a product, ALL inventory is moved to that location, so for each item you’ll only ever have stock in one place (per warehouse).
Also in this screenshot above, you can see the address formatting (all caps, set this at Setup::Company::Other options), and also a barcode for the goods-note ID; just add "_gnBarcode_" to the template. You'll then be able to scan this into the warehouse manager interface to bring up the goods note immediately - more about that in next week's blog!
Where do locations show?
- The inventory detail report shows you exactly what you have and where it lives in the warehouse - and you can filter to just show inventory in a certain location too; handy for detailed stock counting. As you allocate stock or greate goods-out notes, the inventory is allocated from locations based on First-In-First-Out (FIFO).
- When you print a consolidated picking list (select a few lines from the goods-note report and click "pick"), items from all goods notes will be shown on a single report, ordered alphabetically by location so that you can work around the warehouse in an efficient fashion.
- Individual goods-out notes can be set up to show the item location (which may be multiple locations for a single item if you're on multi-concurrent inventory management). If you want to show the item location on your goods-out notes, make sure you turn on the feature at Setup::Products/Inventory.
- If you filter the product list by warehouse (a new feature this release) then you'll also see the product's default location for that warehouse; exporting this screen to Excel is a great place to get data for a stock take.
That's a quick overview of location tracking - for full details pop along to our support pages. For information about all the other new stuff in the April release, make sure you have a good read through our release notes.