Please send your WMS developers to a warehouse for a week to hang out....they can come to ours

  • 11 June 2022
  • 5 replies
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R
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I am going through some of these mobile app workflows, and to be honest they really don’t make much sense. If you go to the “Scan and Receive” workflow, the first thing it asks you is to scan the warehouse you’re in. Then it asks you to scan the Location. Then it asks you to scan the item number.

I’m having a really hard time thinking of any use case where this is the correct order of things. If you receive a shipment from another warehouse, or from a supplier, would the first action you take on a handheld device be to scan the current warehouse you’re in, and the current location you’re standing at? No! You scan the thing you’re receiving (probably a po or transfer order number… in some cases perhaps an item number or a vendor order number). And then the workflow proceeds from there. Maybe someone could already decide where to put that thing...and the system can then proceed to just tell you where it goes. And maybe that thing was shipped to a very specific warehouse, so the system can also default which warehouse you’re receiving it in.

The only way I can see that this gets built the way it works currently is by people who have never been to or worked in a warehouse before. This is a programmer’s idea of how this should work, not a warehouse workers idea of how it should work. And that’s not good. Please send the developers out into the field to learn how a warehouse receiving process normally works!

5 replies

M
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@rosenjon not sure if you figured it out, but believe you should be using the receive and put away function for what your describing. there you scan the PO to create a receipt, and receive to a staging location then can transfer to the actual location

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@mitchellk The receive and putaway function is marginally better than the “one-off” workflows like “Scan and Receive”. But they all suffer from the same problem, which is that they don’t walk the user through the workflow properly, or provide adequate error reporting when things go wrong.

There are also issues with workflow continuity. For example, you can receive a lot tracked item with your own lot identifier via the Receive and Putaway workflow, but you can’t ship an item using the mobile app with a custom lot identifier.

This was more a general statement about the general incoherence of the product, as opposed to a comment about one specific feature. If you have a “Receive and Putaway” function, what is the main difference between that and the “Scan and Receive” function? There needs to be a clear and obvious way to do specific actions, and the user shouldn’t be presented with multiple options that basically do the same thing but in different ways. There are a lot of issues with trying to “wrap” the desktop functionality with a mobile screen, when the mobile workflow should really be constructed using it’s own workflow and prompts.

Dave Gutman
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Hi @rosenjon ,

The ‘Scan and Receive’ is the mobile function that creates Inventory Receipts; ‘Scan and Issue’ creates Inventory Issues. Typically, these functions are used much less frequently than the ‘Receive and Put Away’ (for receiving purchased or transferred goods) and ‘Pick, Pack, and Ship’ on the outbound side.

A few differences between ‘Scan and Receive’ and ‘Receive and Put Away’: the resulting transaction, and the fact that ‘Receive and Put Away’ requires the entry / scan of a PO or Purchase Receipt document number.

Dave Gutman
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@Dave Gutman I am running into issues with the receive part of the receive and putaway function that don’t make sense to me. In order for multiple people to receive a PO you have to create multiple PRs, which makes it very difficult to reconcile against a packing slip as its not all in one spot. Also, it doesn’t update in real time to the PR screen (which it does for putaway and for physical review, not sure why acumatica would design the receive function differently), so you have to release the receipt on the mobile devise, and it doesn’t let you review it on the desktop before you release it. Also, if it’s not updating in real time, and multiple people scan the same item on separate PR, the system won’t recognize this and create issues when they try to release it instead of warning that more items were scanned than on the PO. This also makes it very hard to audit if a vendor sends us multiple shipments against a single PO. 

Dave Gutman
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Thanks for sharing @mitchellk, I just messaged you privately. 

Dave Gutman

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