Dynamics 365 Business Central: Warehouse Management Part 5, Put-Away Templates

Dynamics 365 Business Central: Warehouse Management Part 5, Put-away templates

Hey guys, we're going to keep going on warehouse management. Today, we're going to talk about the put-away template. I touched on it a little bit last time. We did introduce bins into the system. We created a receipt from a purchase order and a put-away. Basically, what we had – and this is for the north location, we created a P.O., which creates a warehouse receipt, which creates a put-away, call it just P.A.

The put-away now is using bins. It's basically taking the warehouse receipt, and if we have warehouse like we had before, we have the receiving, storage, and shipping. The warehouse receipt puts it into shipping. That's a receipt, and then – I mean, sorry, into receiving. Then the put-away puts it into storage, but where in storage?

Here's the thing. When you are directing your put-away people, in the warehouse, to put away the product, does it matter where they put it? Don't you want to have some organization? We only had one storage bin, which is too simplified. Why use bins if you only have one storage bin? We put away into that bin, no problem.

Now, what happens if we introduce another bin right here, and we call this storage two? Then the system has to say, well, where are you going to put it? Are you going to put it in one, or are you going to put it in two? Which one should I pick, or the system pick for you? Of course you can have the pickers just choose this, but there is something called a put-away template in the system, which does give you options about putting away the product. It does look for criteria in order. I'm going to maybe go over this even more in another video, but I'm just going to show you in basic how it works right now.

You can set up the put-away template to direct it to either go into storage or storage two, depending on parameters. In my simple put-away template that we're going to do in the video, I'm just going to have it look for an empty floating bin first. First, look for empty floating bin, and then second, look for a floating bin. In my example, I just created storage two. Both of them are floating, and I'm going to talk about floating later. I just created storage two, and it's empty. If we run through this, it should pick the empty floating bin and put it away there if everything works. Let's check it out.

What I want to do is, like we talked about, go into the put-away template a little bit. The put-away template is very important. It shows a little bit of intelligence in the warehouse application. What I set up right now is that it should find the fixed bin with the same item. If it doesn't find that – so this is how you read it – if it doesn't find that, this first line, then it moves to the second line. This second line is find a floating bin that is empty. If it doesn't find that, then it just says, okay, find a floating bin. If it doesn't find a floating bin, I guess there is nothing here. I'm not sure this line here really matters. I think the end is always finding a floating bin. I could actually check on that. I want to see this in action.

We were just trying to get anything into the system. We just set up this put-away template. I knew if I put a floating bin here, in the end, it would work because ultimately there's definitely going to be a floating bin available. If we read this, and we want to see it in action, here the floating bin empty is what it should pick if I had two bins, two floating bins.

Let's go ahead and do that. I'm going to go ahead and into the location. You can play around with this. I encourage you to do that, location, and go into our north location right here. I'm going to just navigate into the bins. I've got three bins that I set up, storage, shipping, and receiving. I'm talking about storage bins because we put away from receiving into storage. I'm just going to create storage two, here. I have storage two. That's in the storage zone. It's a storage bin, etcetera.

You can see here – this is a calculated field. This is empty. It's checked off because I just created it. This one here is not empty, the one that we just received into. According to the put-away template, it should put into the storage two now that I'm putting away instead of storage. It automatically picks it.

Let's go ahead and create a purchase order for the coffee mug like we always do. We're buying from the Fabrikam. We're getting the coffee mug into the north location – oops, not main, into north. Let's say it's 20. I just go ahead and release it, and then create a – warehouse, create warehouse receipt. Warehouse receipt has been created. Then we're going to go ahead and post this receipt. Yes. It creates a put-away activity automatically, which is nice.

Now I want to go ahead and look at the put-away activity. I have here, put-away. Where is put-aways? Here it is. I'm going to navigate into this one, not registered. I put add it. What we do here is we take those 20 coffee mugs out of the receiving bay, and we place them into storage two bin codes in zoned storage. The put-away template is doing its job. It's actually telling it to find the first empty floating bin and put it there. This was the empty one because I just created it, so that makes perfect sense.

If you are taking a look at a demo environment, you might not see this action type. Even the bin codes might be hidden. You have to remember to go up here, and personalize, and drop in those columns. They're not by default shown, but those are super important, as you can see, tells you take place, which is fantastic, and also bin which it's going in. I wouldn't know why I wouldn't be shown by default.

At least this gives you an idea of how the put-away template works. We might explore that even further. What is a floating bin? I know I've been talking about floating bins like crazy, but I haven't really told you what it is. Maybe that's the topic for the next one.