Dynamics 365 Business Central: Warehouse Management Part 8, Put-Away Example

Dynamics 365 Business Central: Warehouse Management Part 8, Put-away Example

Alright, we’re going to keep going with Warehouse Management. I’m just going to go into an example of how we would set up a warehouse. If we have a warehouse setup like this, I have the receiving bay and I have the shipping bay. Now, inside the storage is where I really want to set things up, realistically. I’m going to set up a storage bay here, which I call store one, where the arrow is for a rack. This is holding the coffee mug, iNECTA, which is the iNECTA coffee mugs. Then I have another rack here, which is storage two and that’s going to hold the coffee mugs for fall. As we’re getting into fall, we have the fall coffee mugs. Then finally over here, we have this just miscellaneous area, so I’m going to put it like this, which is just the floor. We’re going to identify that into two areas and that’s going to be the storage floor one and storage floor two.

When I receive a purchase order in, there’s a PO comes in and the purchase order has the coffee mug iNECTA, that’s coffee mug fall and it has some paper cups. That’s PO coming in here, where you can see that. We can actually – when we put away from the receiving bay, the system, if we’ve set this up to be a fixed rack for coffee mugs, iNECTA, fixed rack for fall and this is floating, the system will automatically say put the coffee mug for iNECTAhere, put the coffee mug for fall here and put the paper cups either here or here. I don’t know how it decides that, but for us it didn’t matter. We just wanted to find a floating bin.

That makes it very simple because every time when we’re receiving a PO, it’s always putting it in the correct areas automatically. The person who’s putting away things, he doesn’t have to know where things belong, the system automatically is telling him where to go. It goes, okay, I’m supposed to go to storage rack one; there are all the coffee mugs for iNECTA. Rack two, fall etc. The same thing happens when we pick. It picks out the right ones.

We need to set up the bin and the bin contents correctly with flagging fixed, and putting in the proper items, and identifying the floor bins. The floor bins are usually over-fall stuff because we cannot set up our entire warehouse, all of the racks, with specific items because we might not have enough space of that. We only keep the main items in racks. On the floor, we throw everything else. That's what the floating bin is for. Let's take a look at that.

I'm going to start by going into my Put-Away Template and explain the template that I've set up. I've changed it a little bit. First, we're going to look for a fixed bin with the same item. A fixed bin will always be specifying an item. That's just the way it works. You cannot create a fixed bin that does not have an item attached to it. Fixed bins are always item specific. Then for a floating bin with the same item, in that case, there is already that item in that floating bin. It's looking to put the same item with the other items that are in the floating bin. If we put away an item, before, into a floating bin, same item will be put in the same place. Then we look for an empty floating bin if we can't find any one of these top two. Finally, we just go for any floating bin, so anything that we can find.

If I got into my location – I've changed it a little bit, as I mentioned on the whiteboard. The location, north location, right now, has a couple more bins. We have, of course, the receiving, shipping bins, which are trivial for their purpose. We've created four storage bins. Two of them are racks, right here. Those are fixed. Basically what we have, we have shelves. Rack one is for the fall coffee mugs. If I go in here, I can look at the contents and I can see that it's a fixed bin content for the fall coffee mug.

Then rack two is for the iNECTA coffee mug. We take a look at that. That's here, fixed as well, for the iNECTA coffee mug. Storage floor one is a floating bin. If we take a look at the bin contents for that, we don't really have anything. It's not fixed. It doesn't have an item. It's opened. The same thing for storage floor two. The idea is I have shelves, two shelves, where I'm putting in those two items. Anything else, I'm just going to be putting on the floor. I have two areas on the floor.

If I go ahead and create a purchase order and do a put-away now according to this set-up – so let's do a purchase order right here. I'm hoping that this is getting closer to a realistic example where you're managing your warehouse. This is one scenario of that. I'm going to receive the iNECTA coffee mug, north, and that should go into a fixed bin if everything works out fine. We have 50 there. Then I'm going to get the fall coffee mug. That's going into the north location as well. That should go into a fixed bin.

Let's go ahead and just pick up something – paper coffee cups. I don't have a fixed bin for those. I'm just going to be putting them on the floor. We're getting 500 for 20 cents each. Let's put a realistic price on this one – oops, that's a five, okay. Alright, so I'm going to go ahead and release, and then create, let me see, actions, warehouse, create warehouse receipt. There it is. Now I'm going to go ahead and post this receipt, yes. That goes fine. Now we have a put-away activity.

Let's take a look at that. That's the whole test. Put-away, let's see, where are the put-aways? Here we go. There's one here. Here we go, four clicks into it. Okay, so what is the system telling us to do? It says, take the iNECTA coffee mug out of receiving and put it into storage rack two. That works perfectly. Take the fall coffee mugs, put it into storage one. That's perfect as well. These are in the racks, storage rack one, storage rack two and one. Finally, it says, well, the paper cup, it doesn't have a fixed area, so put that in the floor. It picks two. Why it picked two and not one, no idea, but we said they were equal, so it goes into two. This is now organizing for you where your things are going, which is exactly the idea behind the put-away worksheet. 

We need to set up the bin and the bin contents correctly, with block andfixed and putting in the proper items and identifying the floor bins. The floor bins are usually overflow stuff.  We cannot set up our entire warehouse, all of the racks, with specific items, because we might not have enough space for that, so we only keep the main items in racks and on the floor, we throw everything else. That’s what the floating bin is for.