Inventory app with multiple warehouses

[dessie_moonsamy]

Hi All,

I am creating an inventory app. I have 1 Main Inventory table - The Inventory table is the total Inventory on hand from 5 different warehouses. Each warehouse has multiple items and the items in 1 warehouse can be similar to items in another warehouse.

Step 1
Customer places an order for stock. I don’t want them to choose which warehouse they want the stock from.

Step 2
Head Office receives the order and approves the order.

Step 3
Head office need to allocate stock from a warehouse or from multiple warehouses.

Step 4
Customer receives the confirmation of the order being approved and where he must go to collect each item from.

I have setup the tables for each warehouse and the main inventory table
I have set up the order process

I need assistance in setting up the allocation of the stock from the individual warehouse.

please can you provide some guidance

thank you
Dessie

[WillowMobileSys]

dessie_moonsamy:

I have setup the tables for each warehouse and the main inventory table
I have set up the order process

It is not clear if you have the inventory broken out into separate tables by warehouse or if you have multiple entries in the main table by product and warehouse. I’ll assume it’s the later.

Also, I’ll assume you have an Order parent table with child table for Order Details.

What you are describing is Order Fulfillment.

What I would recommend is a Fulfillment table that is a Child of the Order Details table. It is only shown to those authorized to perform fulfillment.

The idea is the fulfillment specialist would open the Order, open an Order Detail item and then, add fulfillment rows specifying the warehouse and quantity from each. This will be easy if all of the warehouse entries are in the main inventory table as assumed above.

Does that help at all?

By the way, in setting up the relationships between the tables in this way, if you could capture the process humans perform for fulfillment into an algorithm, then it could be automated to add the fulfillment rows as soon as the order is saved.

[dessie_moonsamy]

Hi John,

Yes you are 100%…Order fulfilment is exactly what I need. I will set this up today and let you know how it works out.

By way of the algorithm we would need it to decide which warehouse to fulfil the order from. I would really appreciate it if you coyld share more information on that.

Thank you so much
Dessie

[WillowMobileSys]

dessie_moonsamy:

Step 3
Head office need to allocate stock from a warehouse or from multiple warehouses.

In your original post you made this statement above. If you can figure out how the Head office makes these decisions then you can likely encapsulate that into an automated process.

For example, maybe they simply say…

"Fulfill from warehouse 1 and if not enough ...
    assign from warehouse 1 and complete from warehouse 2.  
If still not enough then ...
    assign from warehouse 2 and complete from warehouse 3,
....and so on."

This can easily be captured into an automated process.

There can be complexities that prevent automation. It just depends on the business process to fulfill the orders. You’ll need to know what that process is.

[dessie_moonsamy]

I see, wow excellent. Let me get more detail from client and advise.

How would you even write a formula for something like this?

stay blessed John