Hi All. Since there isn’t yet an official Openboxes manual, I am having some difficulty designing the architecture for my company’s workflow. I’ve added all my products and inventory levels successfully, and now I’m hoping one of you who are far more experienced with OB could suggest some tips on how I should structure everything…
My Workflow : We are a covid testing company, and we also do fogging and corporate disinfection services. Til now, all our warehouse and inventory management has been on paper and it was a disaster. My workflow is pretty simple - I need to do the following :
when a team goes out to test some people, they need to get supplies from the warehouse… test kits, swabs, gloves etc etc. This isn’t really a shipment though since our people will use them in their job. So it’s not then a "shipment"is it? What’s the standard way to handle that?
some equipment comes back to the warehouse, some does not. for example, cleaning chemicals get used, but the sprayer machines are returned. So i need to re - check in stock to the warehouse end of day. how should we be doing that? Stock adjustments look easy but i sense that’s not the right way
as well, when stuff leaves the warehouse, i need to document what internal department requested it so it can be charged to the right cost centre
lastly, when stock is sent from one warehouse to another internally, what function is used to do that … outbound stock movement?
i want to set up bins for some products, so that for example there may be 1000 test kits here, but 200 are set aside for internal employee testing while the rest are for sale. How is that done in Openboxes?
Responses from anybody to any of these issues will be greatly appreciated!
This is great. Thanks for writing it up. I will respond with my thoughts today, but hopefully we’ll get feedback from other users as well.
Is there a standard list of products used for each service?
Do you have designated teams (the same members each time)? If not, is there a way to differentiate teams? By day? By color? By job type? I’m trying to figure out if there’s some way to check material and equipment out into a virtual location by team.
For now, the best way to do this would be through an Outbound Stock Movement or a Stock Request. Just ignore the shipment-specific fields for now. We’ll eventually go back to using a customizable workflow that allows you to define fields and documents that are required for each movement type.
I don’t have enough information to tell you what the destination of the stock movement would be but I imagine it could be a physical location (e.g a vehicle used to transport the team to a work site) or a virtual location (e.g. “Checked out to Team X”). In either case, the items would be added to an Outbound Stock Movement and the stock movement would be picked, packed and transferred to the destination. You could use a Stocklist if you had a set list of products for a particular type of job. But it sounds like that’s not the case.
some equipment comes back to the warehouse, some does not. for example, cleaning chemicals get used, but the sprayer machines are returned. So i need to re - check in stock to the warehouse end of day. how should we be doing that? Stock adjustments look easy but i sense that’s not the right way
So when the job is done, you can do an Outbound Stock Movement in the opposite direction with the equipment and left over materials.
You can also use the Manage Inventory to consume items (there’s actually a better way using a Consumption transaction, but I am having some issues with that feature at the moment).
as well, when stuff leaves the warehouse, i need to document what internal department requested it so it can be charged to the right cost centre
If you ended up using the Outbound Stock Movement feature, you could use the Requested By field to set the department. If you need other metadata fields for this we could consider adding them.
You could also use the Request Stock feature. To do this, create a Location for your internal departments, log into one of those locations, and create a Stock Request with origin = Main Warehouse and destination = Internal Department and whatever items they are requesting. Once submitted the request will be in the Outbound Stock Movement list within the Main Warehouse. So you’d log back into the Main Warehouse to fulfill the request.
lastly, when stock is sent from one warehouse to another internally, what function is used to do that … outbound stock movement?
I would use the Outbound Stock Movement for now. The simpler option would be the Transfer each item separately, but that would be tedious if you wanted to move a bunch of items at once. We use a Transfer Order for put away operations so we plan to extend the Transfer Order feature to transfer multiple items to a different location. But I don’t have a timeline for when that will be complete.
i want to set up bins for some products, so that for example there may be 1000 test kits here, but 200 are set aside for internal employee testing while the rest are for sale. How is that done in Openboxes?
For the Depot location type, add Pick stock, Putaway stock, and Partial receiving to the Supported Activities field.
Use the Record Stock feature to transfer stock from the Default bin location to the new bin location. This requires you to 0 out the previous line so that the transaction replaces the old value.
it’s based on the project manager’s decision on the needs for the job they are doing. For example, lets say a client requests 23 pcr tests and office disinfection. The manager calculates how much chemical they will need, how many pairs of gloves, how much alcohol, how many swabs, and so on. no two jobs are ever the same
i’m not sure if this is a bug or I’m using the system wrong, but thisis confusing and makes no sense to me… I have some masks. I had 100 to start with. I did an inventory adjustment as you suggested (inventory/manage inventory, clicked on product). I selected 7 masks and said consumed. Now if you click in inventory/browse inventory, you see qty 100. if you go to manage inventory you see qty 93. and if you look at the item you see both. screenshots included :
The issue with the inventory browser (first screenshot) is a known bug that was fixed in 0.8.13-hotfix2 (https://github.com/openboxes/openboxes/releases/tag/v0.8.13-hotfix2). I think I might have started you off with 0.8.13 or 0.8.13-hotfix1. You can check the version in the footer.
The second screenshot shows the correct value.
To read the stock history (in the third screenshot) just realize that the balance column shows the QoH at the time right after each transaction was completed. So you see a balance of 100 here for the cycle count performed on 22/Nov/2020 and then a balance of 93 after the adjustment transaction has been added. The total at the bottom should reflect the current value as shown in the Status box in the upper left corner of the stock card page.
