AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

It would be nice if products and product variants had an additional field for specifying where in the warehouse an item can be found. This new field should also appear in the pull list and could also help with taking inventory. We have a report we run against the DB for generating our worksheets.

For example, we use a large number of wire racks for our business. We would enter something like "R7S3" to indicate rack 7, shelf 3. Very simple, but it does help the new people out.

I know we could add it to a custom field in the product template or embed location info as part of the SKU, but this seems like a very common need. Am I missing something obvious?

-Neal

Neal,

Doesn't the SKU dictate that for you now?

My experience with warehousing systems is such that they always set the SKU numbering sequence to directly correlate to warehouse location. That's why manufacturer numbers are kept separate from UPC numbers which in turn is kept separate from the SKU.

SKU 101684 was located in Isle 10, shelving unit 16, bin 84.

I believe that's why multi-warehouse operations have extra-lengthy SKU numbers because they also have to dictate continents, states or regions as well as stock location.

Unfortunately, this is my wife's business and she is not that organized. She moves stuff around all the time and doesn't want to change the SKU each time. The Rack/Shelf system she wants to use is more of a suggestion for new shipping people.

She uses the SKU to encode manufacturer, product, size and color variant information and doesn't want it to change over time.

Weird I know...

Regards,
Neal

I feel your pain. I have some items that are far easier for me to identify when the SKU is encoded as your wife is doing.

If she's doing that, then she's probably not really using the manufacturer ID field then right?

Without modifying the core data schema, her only option would be to use the Manufacturer ID field as her stock keeping value.

Joe,

No we use the ManufacturerId field, but that doesn't print out on the packing list, invoice or pull list, so she also has the SKU reflect this info.

Another option would be to add a field to a new product template that would contain this additional information and then create a custom report that generates the pull lists or modify the one Able provides.

I have actually started to create a Windows program for maintaining certain parts of the site like inventory and I will be adding report writing capabilities soon. Even if we don't get the new field, I can make this work.

I love the fact that I have direct access to the database back-end and can do this kind of stuff if needed. It also helps that I am a software engineer in my "real job".

Thanks,
-Neal

Has this ever been resolved? We are trying to get more organized when we move to a larger location, and this has been a request by the staff pulling orders. The SKU must remain consistent with our accounting software, so it is not possible to use this field by adding extra information UNLESS someone can tell me how to truncate the SKU when we export our shipped orders at the end of the day (we have an ASPX file that we run from a web browser to create a file for importing daily sales into our accounting package). If someone knows how to truncate data to a certain number of characters, please let me know, as that would at least be a workable temporary solution.

Ultimately, I am sure that there are a lot of others out there that would find it helpful to have the ability to add a location column to the pull sheets, so a solution where the information can be in the order_items table would likely be best.

Definitely still needed, still not a feature in the system. AC7 simply cannot reach the next level in the industry until it provides better warehousing/inventory support.

The only way to do it effectively would to be modify full source code and add the functionality yourself. Quite a task too given how deeply involved the warehousing/inventory functions work now.

Adding a "Bin #" situation would be far simpler. That's just a matter of a custom field in Add/Edit Products page and then updating the pull sheets. Probably 2-3 hours work at most but you're still left with a single warehouse to use......

I think that for most people using a Bin # would be sufficient, as most likely do not run from multiple warehouses. Still, I would not know where to start to get the new field to be moved to the Order_Items table when an order is placed so that it can be pulled for the pull sheet.

Brewhaus wrote:Still, I would not know where to start to get the new field to be moved to the Order_Items table when an order is placed so that it can be pulled for the pull sheet.

It'll take a few different customizations to make it happen but it's certainly possible. There's a coupon of extra fields on the basket items object that will pass all the way through checkout into an order item. LineMessage works well if not used for anything else.

So basically you'd add a new custom field to the add/edit product pages for Bin #.

Then modify checkout so that each basket item extra field is updated with the bin number from the product associated with that basket item.

After checkout, the bin # will pass through automatically. So now you just need to modify pull sheets to show the extra field in a "Bin #" column. Grouping and/or sorting by the bin # would take some more work as well but you get the idea.

What about using the Manufacturer Part No. (ModelNumber column in the Products table)? We do not use that, and I am betting that most people are not using that field. We could put the Bin # into that field, and then just have to get that information to carry across to the order information so that it can be printed on the pull sheet.

But, how can we get this information to be pulled across at the checkout when the order is placed?

Brewhaus wrote:But, how can we get this information to be pulled across at the checkout when the order is placed?

ModelNumber doesn't get stored in the line item. SKU would, but not ModelNumber.

How about one of the shipping values like weight, height, length or perhaps COGS? They're all numerics and they get pulled into the basket item.

A good way to decide what field to use is to look at ac_OrderItems. Those are the fields that completely pass through checkout.