Best practices: Layout of stock provision via multiple warehouses

[Mathias Behrle]

Hi all,

I just wanted to get feedback on how to setup the following scenario in the
best way. This scenario is a quite common pattern used by a number of companies
in the retail sector and could serve probably as a general pattern also for
others.

The company is sharing (pooling) its storing capacity over

- the main warehouse
- several stores nearby in the city
- additionally a webshop shall be driven with the base of available products
computed from the products available in the different warehouses. So the
webshop basically is just handled as another store, but without stock (at
least in terms of storage). There shall be a precedence on how the goods for
the sales of the webshop shall be picked from the different warehouses.

Purchases shall only be made from the main warehouse, which serves generally as
the central communication point to the suppliers (incoming shipments, returns,
etc.). Deliveries to stores and pickings from stores back to the shipping
department are usually made twice a day.


To represent the above scenario I am currently using the following layout:

- The main warehouse as well as the stores are defined as locations of type
warehouse.

- The supply chain from the main warehouse to the stores is defined by order
points of type internal shipment.

- The supply chain of the main warehouse is defined by oder points of
type purchase request.

- The supply chain of the webshop is: just pick the available products from
their respective locations (with a defined precedence).


This basic setup works out of the box except for:

- Internal shipments currently are created additively, not being replaced
with the complete numbers of the actual state (like purchase requests).
I don't know if this behavior is necessary by design/use case or if it could
generally be changed to behave in the same way as purchase requests.

- The current handling of internal shipments is not convenient to handle
requests, where often only a part of the requested quantity can directly be
assigned (e.g. existing stock on the main warehouse), but the remaining
quantity has to be assigned later (e.g. when available from the main
warehouse in future, after purchase).
We will have to find a way, how to automatically assign available stock while
waiting for stock to be purchased. At least having to go back to Draft to be
able to delete non assignable products is more than unconvenient and probably
bothers other users, too. Perhaps we could extend the force assign wizard to
ask to split out non assignable products into a new shipment?

- The webshop will need a special provision to create internal shipments
according to the available stock in the different warehouses.


Does this basic setup look ok for you?

Thanks for your input,

Mathias

--

Mathias Behrle
MBSolutions
Gilgenmatten 10 A
D-79114 Freiburg

Tel: +49(761)471023
Fax: +49(761)4770816
http://www.m9s.biz
UStIdNr: DE 142009020
PGP/GnuPG key availabable from any keyserver, ID: 0x8405BBF6

[Albert Cervera i Areny]

I think it would make sense to use the same behaviour as purchase
requests or production requests: removing existing shipments and
creating new ones. Currently tryton cannot distinguish between
internal shipments created manually from those created automatically
so that would be needed to remove automatically created ones only. One
possibility would be to add the state "Request" to internal shipments,
just like how productions work.

> - The current handling of internal shipments is not convenient to handle
> requests, where often only a part of the requested quantity can directly be
> assigned (e.g. existing stock on the main warehouse), but the remaining
> quantity has to be assigned later (e.g. when available from the main
> warehouse in future, after purchase).
> We will have to find a way, how to automatically assign available stock while
> waiting for stock to be purchased. At least having to go back to Draft to be
> able to delete non assignable products is more than unconvenient and probably
> bothers other users, too. Perhaps we could extend the force assign wizard to
> ask to split out non assignable products into a new shipment?

That sounds reasonable to me.

> - The webshop will need a special provision to create internal shipments
> according to the available stock in the different warehouses.
>
>
> Does this basic setup look ok for you?

It does for me.

>
> Thanks for your input,
>
> Mathias
>
> --
>
> Mathias Behrle
> MBSolutions
> Gilgenmatten 10 A
> D-79114 Freiburg
>
> Tel: +49(761)471023
> Fax: +49(761)4770816
> http://www.m9s.biz
> UStIdNr: DE 142009020
> PGP/GnuPG key availabable from any keyserver, ID: 0x8405BBF6

--
Albert Cervera i Areny
Tel. 93 553 18 03
@albertnan
www.NaN-tic.com

[Guillem Barba Domingo]

2015-03-11 22:41 GMT+01:00 Albert Cervera i Areny <alb...@nan-tic.com>:

2015-03-11 19:03 GMT+01:00 Mathias Behrle <mbe...@m9s.biz>:

> - The current handling of internal shipments is not convenient to handle
>   requests, where often only a part of the requested quantity can directly be
>   assigned (e.g. existing stock on the main warehouse), but the remaining
>   quantity has to be assigned later (e.g. when available from the main
>   warehouse in future, after purchase).
>   We will have to find a way, how to automatically assign available stock while
>   waiting for stock to be purchased. At least having to go back to Draft to be
>   able to delete non assignable products is more than unconvenient and probably
>   bothers other users, too. Perhaps we could extend the force assign wizard to
>   ask to split out non assignable products into a new shipment?

That sounds reasonable to me.

It is the current behaviour if you don't force the assign. At least in productions and sale shipments: the available stock is assigned and the other is splitted in a draft move 

--

Guillem Barba
http://www.guillem.alcarrer.net