Warehouse Insight 3.0: A First Look for Business Central Partners and End-users

Introduction

This is Mark here, and today we’re going to go through some of the capabilities of the new version of Warehouse Insight, and also talk more generally about what you need to properly operate your warehouse. We’ll spend most of our time in the software, but first we’ll go through a short PowerPoint so you know what you’re going to see in the demo.

We’ll probably run a bit more than 60 minutes. If you have questions, enter them in the chat box in the GoToWebinar panel. I’ll do my best to answer them as we go, but more than likely I’ll answer the questions from the chat window at the end, and I’ll stick around after the 60-minute mark to answer any additional questions that come up.

About Insight Works

You probably know a bit about us already because you signed up for the webinar on our website. If you don’t, we’ve been around for about ten years, and we work primarily through our reseller partners. If your current Business Central partner is one of our resellers, they’ll be able to help you with pricing and information, and help you set up a dedicated demo or whatever you need to evaluate the software. If your partner isn’t one of our resellers, have them get in touch with us and we can talk to them about that.

We work a lot in warehousing, manufacturing, and retail. Really, any time you need to touch a piece of inventory, that’s where our applications come into play, whether it’s warehouse management, retail sales, or production management. There are a whole bunch of applications here, and our website has detail on all of them.

Warehouse Insight and WMS Express

What we’re focused on today is warehouse management, specifically barcoding, although we’ll touch on everything. I want to clarify a couple of things first. We have two WMS applications. WMS encompasses more than barcode scanning, but from a mobile device perspective, these are the two.

The first is Warehouse Insight. It’s subscription based and it does everything. It has a built-in application designer and all sorts of tools to tailor the solution to your requirements. It supports any number of devices, and it’s used everywhere from a small retail outlet with one scanner up to large warehouses with 200 devices.

The second is WMS Express, which is free. It’s a subset of the full Warehouse Insight and runs on the same platform, but it’s completely free for up to five concurrent devices.

That word concurrent is important from a pricing perspective, and it applies to both Warehouse Insight and WMS Express. I might have ten devices out there, but if only five are ever in use at the same time, and in use means talking to Business Central within the last two minutes, I only need five licenses, whether that’s for WMS Express or for full Warehouse Insight.

The reason I mention this is that what we’re about to cover applies to both the free version and the subscription version, with a few exceptions. The free version can’t really be customized, for example, but for the most part everything we’re about to cover applies to both.

Device Interface Options

Let’s start with how you deploy the solution, and by that I mean what users see on the device when they start up. We’ve got several different modes.

Card View

The first is the directed card view. It’s been there forever, and a lot of people don’t know it exists. The card view is good for devices like a tablet on a pick cart or a forklift. It shows you one record at a time, and it’s all configurable: you can put whatever fields you want on it, and you can add your own fact boxes. Fact boxes work in all of these views, and you can put them anywhere you like, whether that’s an external website or a map of the warehouse. Once I’ve executed a record, in this case a pick, it takes me to the next one, and so on.

Grid View

The next one that has been around forever is the compact view, which we typically call the grid view. This is nice when you’re dealing with smaller screens on rugged devices. A device with a physical keypad has a smaller screen, and with the grid view I can fit a lot of information on it and make it easy for people to see what they’re looking for. I can control which columns are visible right from the device, I can sort, and I can add color rules, like the one I added here that changes colors. It’s an efficient view, especially on smaller screens.

Rich Tile View

In version 3, we’re also adding the tile view. The rich tile view lets you show richer information, specifically things like the item picture and whatever fields you want. Again, it’s completely configurable. You decide whether to show the package number, the serial number, or the picture.

Different applications can have different views. In a picking application I might want to show the picture, or maybe I just want a lot of information about what I’m supposed to be picking and don’t need the picture. On the receiving side, maybe I want a grid view instead of a tile view. And depending on the type of device you’re using, you can have different views by device.

Showing Quantities

One other thing while I’m here: showing quantities as 0 of 2 or 0 of 7 is also an option. In the grid view we’ve always shown one number, which is what’s left for the employee to do, so it’s not confusing. Now you have the option to show the open quantity, or how much has been completed out of the total.

I don’t really like the second option, but some people like the way it looks. If a worker has picked 18 of these, then thinks they have 17 more to go, picks another 17, and doesn’t enter the quantities properly, you’ve overpicked. It’s better to show only what’s left to pick. But again, it’s completely configurable.

Voice Guidance

Maybe you don’t even want to look at the screen. No problem. We now have voice guidance, which is pretty much what it sounds like: the system can talk to you at various points in the applications.

We have a standard voice picking add-on, and the add-ons are all free. They’re part of our Add-On Catalog. You click a button, install it, and you have that capability on the handheld device. Voice guidance lets you, or your partner, or whoever looks after Business Central, have the system speak to employees at just about any point where they interact with the system. For roughly 95% of the places you interact with the system, you can have it talk back and provide instructions on what to do.

It’s great for hands-free picking. You still need your hands to pick, but you don’t have to hold a device in them. You can use wearables, with a glove scanner and a reader on your wrist, and the system talks to you so you can pick very quickly.

Barcode-Free Scanning and RFID

Another capability is barcode-free scanning. Maybe you want voice guidance and you don’t even have barcodes. We can scan text as quickly as you can scan a barcode.

This is great for people who are new to scanning and barcoding. Maybe you’ve got 600 bins with bin labels that don’t have barcodes on them. No problem. I can scan the text on those bin labels as quickly as I could scan a barcode. Similarly, if you’re a food distributor and lot numbers arrive in human-readable print on the cartons, I can scan those lot numbers without needing a barcode, and then potentially generate a barcode after that.

We’ve also had RFID support for many years, if you don’t want to use barcodes and want to do batch scanning with RFID. There’s a video on our website and on our YouTube channel that goes through how RFID works with our applications.

Offline Capability

Back to people who are new to barcoding or mobile warehouse management: one of the issues is that they may not have good Wi-Fi. Version 2, the current version, supports dead spots in a lot of situations with store and forward, where it keeps retrying as people scan in a Wi-Fi dead spot.

In version 3, we’ve extended that significantly to give you more complete offline capability. All the standard tasks, like executing a pick or a receipt against a warehouse receipt or a purchase order, or a pick against a sales order, an inventory pick, or a warehouse pick, can be done offline. The device recognizes when you’ve gone offline, captures everything locally, and when you’re back online it sends everything back to Business Central automatically. It’s pretty seamless.

Version 2 does some of that, and you also have the scratchpad today if you need to go out to a customer location and count inventory when you’re not on their Wi-Fi. Version 3 gives us additional capability.

But I will mention that you don’t want to use this as a crutch. You want good Wi-Fi in your facility, and you don’t want to go offline if you can help it. This is for emergencies: the Wi-Fi went out, there was a power failure, and you can keep working as if that hadn’t happened. You don’t want to rely on it for bad Wi-Fi in the facility. It’s like driving along when your windshield wiper breaks, and your backup plan is to stick your head out the window. You don’t want to do that. Fix the root cause, whether that’s the windshield wiper or your bad Wi-Fi, so you can work effectively.

Too many issues can happen when you’re offline. I could do a whole pick offline, and then when it syncs, find out that somebody in Business Central deleted that pick because they wanted to combine it with something else. Now it’s a big mess. You want to be real time with Business Central. But I’ll show you how this works today so you get a feel for it.

Mobile Device Management

Whether you’re online or offline, you also have mobile device management. You’ve always been able to use mobile device management with Warehouse Insight; the difference now is that we include it. You can buy scanners anywhere you like, and your existing scanners are no problem. But if you buy the hardware from us, you get free mobile device management for a year. If you didn’t buy the hardware from us, you get close to a 50% discount on the price of the mobile device management.

We use a solution called SureMDM. You get your own environment with your own administrative login, and you can manage your own devices, but we set it up for you. When you’re ready to deploy, we send you a barcode that you scan on a new device, you tap a few times, it installs everything, and you’re up and running. From there you can maintain devices, get remote access to individual devices, see where they are in the facility, or see which ones are offline.

If you have a small number of devices, it may not be worth it. Once you’re used to it, setting up a device manually takes about two minutes from start to finish to get Warehouse Insight installed and configured. So it’s up to you. Our focus is your warehouse devices, but you can buy additional licenses to manage laptops, phones, or other devices if you want.

Windows App and Barcode Simulator Power Tool

With version 3, we also have a Windows client. Way back in the olden days we had a Windows client that worked basically the same as the scanner app, but recently we haven’t. If you wanted to run something in Windows for training, demos, development, or testing, you had to run an emulator. That works fine, but it’s not ideal.

Now we have a full Windows application that’s exactly the same as what runs on the mobile devices, built on the same code base, so it looks and works pretty much exactly the same. For testing, demos, training, and development, it’s an ideal solution, and it will be available on the Microsoft Store.

There’s also a companion tool. If I’m in Windows and want to scan barcodes, I could potentially use the camera or a webcam, but we also have the Barcode Simulator Power Tool, which will also be available on the Microsoft Store. You define whatever barcodes you like, then click one and click send, or double-click, and it simulates that barcode in the Warehouse Insight application. That makes it easy to emulate what users would be doing, right within Windows, without a physical device.

If you do want a physical device and don’t have a dedicated scanner, the app also runs on consumer-grade phones, using the camera for scanning. Today you install it on a phone the same way you would on a mobile device, through the MDM or manually. With version 3, it’s also available on the Google Play Store, so you can install it from Google Play, or use MDM solutions that require Google Play.

So that’s a lot of the scanning: card view, grid view, and tile view, voice guidance, barcode-free scanning, RFID, and the Windows version. That’s all related to scanning within the warehouse.

Shipping from the Handheld

The other part is what you do when you need to ship things out. You can do that from the handheld devices as well. For domestic parcel shipments, you can generate shipping labels directly from the device, like a UPS, FedEx, or Canada Post label, using a free application that plugs into Warehouse Insight.

If you need more robust shipping, such as international shipments, you can do that from the handheld device if you have Dynamic Ship. Dynamic Ship is the last part of warehouse management: we scan in the warehouse, and then we need to get what we scanned out the door. OrderShip Express is the free version for domestic parcel shipments. You still pay for the shipping, but you don’t pay for any software. Dynamic Ship is subscription based and gives you LTL, full truckload, parcel, international, and pretty much anything you need for shipping from within Business Central, and you can access it from the handheld devices to generate shipping labels and bills of lading.

If you’re coming from another system like GP and you already use a provider, like an online TMS, we probably have you covered. We have over 30 connectors built for Dynamic Ship. Many are direct, like FedEx Freight, and there are a number of direct LTL connectors, but we typically work through partners that connect to multiple carriers. You can check our website for the key ones. If you need a connector we don’t have, we can build it. If you’re coming from an existing provider, just ask, and there’s no cost to plug these into Dynamic Ship.

If you don’t have anything today and need a shipping integration, the one we typically use for parcel is EasyPost, our primary parcel connector. If you go with EasyPost, you get special rates as a Dynamic Ship customer. For most people, EasyPost will be free to use: no monthly cost, 2,000 shipments a month for free, and a 40% discount on transaction costs after that. It’s a pretty good deal to use Dynamic Ship with EasyPost.

More Than Barcode Scanning

There’s a lot more to managing a warehouse than that. If all you want to do is scan barcodes, you’ll find something like 80 scanning applications on AppSource, which is now called Microsoft Marketplace. Everybody and their brother-in-law seems to have a scanning app, and they call it WMS. It’s not WMS, because managing a warehouse is more than scanning barcodes, and it’s more than scanning barcodes and shipping.

That’s where we come in. We have a comprehensive suite of solutions that work together so you can run a warehouse or distribution center properly. The Order Fulfillment Worksheet is almost a must-have for a distribution center or any type of warehouse. There’s the scanning, and quality inspections that you can run on a handheld device or from within Business Central, for inbound and outbound. Advanced Inventory Count simplifies your cycle counts and can save you a ton of money and effort managing cycle counts and inventory counts. And there’s purchase planning, so you can plan purchases effectively within Business Central for your warehouse.

You can buy these individually. You don’t have to get everything; you pick and choose. Most of the applications on this screen are actually free. You plug in what you need, but you need all of these solutions working together to properly run your distribution center or warehouse.

Demo: Devices and Interface Options

That took less time than I thought, so let’s look at the software and go through a few capabilities. I’m going to do the demo on these devices, which are the same devices you saw in the screenshots in the PowerPoint. We’ve got the big forklift-mounted unit that weighs about 10 pounds, running the large card view so the driver can see the next task. Then a device with a significantly larger screen, and then a typical rugged device.

You’ll notice the logos on the screens. I did that so I could remember which screen I’m looking at, but you can change the logo on the screen. That applies to every version of the software we’ve ever had. You can put your own logo there, or a picture of the person using the device, or anything that helps identify the device or just makes it look nice.

Most of this works the same as before. You’ve got a few more options now, like grid spacing and font sizing. If you’ve seen our demos of the current version, a lot of it is the same. This is a completely new platform under the hood, so there are big differences there, but users won’t see many differences. If I open item inquiry, it looks basically the same as the current version.

Where you might see a difference is in picking. On this device, I’ll go into picks. You can change the grid sizing, so for people with big sausage fingers who can’t deal with tighter spacing, you can make it larger so it’s easier to tap.

Voice Picking on the Handheld

You may have heard that. That was the voice guidance on this device. It talks to me when I open the pick and tells me which bin to go to, and once I’m at the bin, it tells me what to do. You can still use the menu or tap the screen if you like.

This other device is connected to the exact same company. If I open the same pick here, it’s in the grid view, and I can see six items on the screen. I can sort by tapping the header. If this device were in the tile view, I’d only see two entries and I’d be scrolling all the time.

Hotkeys and Fact Boxes

Ideally, you never want to touch the screen. You want to scan barcodes and use the keypad, and that’s it. If you find yourself touching the screen, you may want to change things. What people don’t always realize is that there are standard hotkeys for all of the actions. For example, F4 switches to item inquiry, so on a device with a physical keypad I can press F4 instead of tapping the screen and opening the menu.

That’s also an example of a fact box, where I can show whatever detail I want, on any screen, at the bottom or the side. In the tile view you tend to touch the screen more because you’re scrolling through more information. The hotkeys are still there in tile view, but without a physical keypad they aren’t very useful. The big forklift-mounted computer does have the hotkeys.

Walking Through a Voice-Guided Pick

The voice guidance is completely configurable. It’s not set in stone: you can change what it says, and you can add voice guidance to any application.

When I opened the pick, it told me which bin to go to. I go to that bin and scan the bin code. The barcodes here come from our sample barcode list, which is great for generating barcodes to test with physical devices. Once I scan the bin, the system knows I’m at the right bin.

Ideally you’d use wearables: a glove scanner on my hand and the device on my wrist. I walk up, scan the bin, it tells me what to grab, I grab it and scan the barcode. You can set it so that as soon as I scan the item, it assumes I’ve picked the entire quantity and I’m off to the races. That’s actually better than traditional voice picking, because you still get physical verification that you’re picking the right product.

On this one I have it prompting for quantity, but you could have it automatically accept the required quantity. It tells me how many I picked, knows the line is complete, and moves me to the next one, telling me which bin to go to. If you didn’t hear the instruction, you can scan a barcode to repeat it, maybe stuck on the wearable, or use the menu item to repeat the voice instructions.

That tile view can be enabled or disabled. This other device is showing exactly the same pick without the tile view, so you have control by device over which interface you use.

Demo: Offline Mode

Now let’s look at the offline side. First, let me show you in Business Central what is actually cached. In device setup, you can control offline capability by device, so you could allow some devices to work offline and not others.

On each device, you can see what we allow offline. Warehouse activities, meaning inventory picks, warehouse picks, and movements, are cached, along with warehouse receipts, shipments, and sales orders. In this case, every 30 minutes it makes sure anything done in the last 30 minutes is cached on the device. Items are cached locally as well, and you control what’s stored on each device.

Incidentally, you can hide or show the icons on the main screen. If somebody’s device is only ever used for picking, you can hide all the other icons and show only the pick icon.

Here I’ve got a number of picks and some purchase orders that map to warehouse receipts. If I put the device in airplane mode and go offline, you’ll see an offline icon in the corner, so the system knows we’re working offline. I can still open the pick we were working on and start scanning. I’ll go to bin 0201 and pick the 1908-S. If you’ve seen our other videos, you’ll know we can also pop up a picture of the item I just scanned, so even if you don’t have a fact box or aren’t using the tile view, you still get visual verification.

I picked four of those, and I have hide completed turned on, so the line disappears once it’s fully picked. You can see it’s now queued for transmission. I can go into receiving, open receipt number seven, scan barcodes, and enter quantities, and you can see more items queued up. There are more queued items than operations I performed because logging is queued as well. I can keep working, picking and receiving, while I’m offline.

When we go back online, it takes a moment for connectivity to return, and then it starts processing the queued items as soon as it’s sure there’s a connection. Now Business Central is updated with everything I did offline. Pretty slick. But again, you don’t want to rely on it, because maybe somebody deleted that pick or that warehouse receipt. It logs the errors so you can see what it couldn’t sync, but you still have to work out how to address them.

Store and Forward

The other option is store and forward. Even if you don’t use full offline mode, if you’re in a dead spot where the device still shows as connected but there’s no bandwidth, it retries sending when a transmission fails.

Another place store and forward helps is high-speed scanning. It doesn’t apply to every configuration, but in receiving, for example, say I have a thousand serial numbers to scan, which is an actual case we have with a customer. With store and forward, I can scan those serial numbers as quickly as I can physically scan them, even three a second, and they’re sent in the background without waiting for Business Central to return each result.

Normally, when we scan something, we tell Business Central what we did and let Business Central validate whether it’s allowed. If I scanned a lot number that’s blocked, it would stop me. With offline or store and forward, the scan is sent in and the error is logged if it couldn’t be processed.

Demo: Windows App

For fun, let’s look at the Windows app. It’s exactly the same application. You can size it to look like a scanner, and it works and looks just like a scanner device. Or you can run it full screen on a tablet in the warehouse or a laptop on a pick cart.

You’ll notice Counter Sales down here. That’s an add-on, and add-ons are things you just plug into Warehouse Insight. We have add-ons for Counter Sales and Shop Floor Insight, so you can run Shop Floor Insight in an interface like this, with full configurability and customizability, as well as Quality Inspector, fixed asset counting, and proof of delivery.

Counter Sales is a full application for point of sale on a tablet, a laptop, or whatever you have at your point-of-sale terminal. Let’s say I start a quick order, which creates a new cash order, and now I want to scan barcodes into it. This is where the Barcode Simulator Power Tool comes in. I choose a barcode and hit send, or turn on the setting to double-click, and it simulates that scan into Warehouse Insight. I can keep double-clicking to scan additional items.

This is also an example of why the tile view might not be best for every interface. Here the text is overlapping. Because it’s completely configurable, I would move the unit price down so the description has the full width.

The usual place you’d use the simulator is testing things like picking. Here I scan the bin, then scan the 1968-S, and you get the general idea. This is a great way to do demos, testing, and training. You can move the simulator to the side of the screen and simulate barcode scans without a scanner.

Add-On Catalog and Application Designer

Now let’s look inside Business Central at how this is set up. I see a number of questions about how to do processes like receiving. I wasn’t going to go into the individual capabilities of all those applications today; I’m focusing on what’s new. If you look at the videos for the current version, the applications are largely the same, with improvements in many of them, and they let us do everything we need for warehouse management within Business Central from the handheld device. We also have license plating, production, and other add-ons we can plug in.

Since I mentioned it, let’s look at the Add-On Catalog. Instead of a whole bunch of checkboxes and features you may or may not want, the Add-On Catalog lets you plug in capabilities quickly and easily. There are many in here, and some third-party add-ons are now being built that will show up in the catalog too.

Say I want to do fixed asset counting with handheld devices. I click on it, click install, and I have the fixed asset count application in Business Central and on the handheld devices. For information, click the documentation link and it explains everything the add-on does. All the source code is also available, so you can download the extension and do whatever you like with it.

I’ve got the fact boxes add-on installed, which gives me standard fact boxes on the handheld devices, like the item image and pick instructions. I also have voice picking installed. Proof of delivery is another one. There was a question about whether proof of delivery works offline. It doesn’t, because the table it uses isn’t cached, but if you’re using a device with a SIM card, you have mobile data to take photos, capture signatures, and so on. It’s a comprehensive solution that runs within Warehouse Insight. If you want it, you click install and try it, and if you don’t, you uninstall it.

Quality Inspector is another one, for inbound, outbound, or general inspections in the warehouse. There’s also the Shop Floor Insight integration, and the ability to generate shipping labels with OrderShip Express, or do something much more comprehensive with Dynamic Ship. Tons of options, and you just plug them in.

Overrides

If there isn’t an add-on for what you’re trying to do, and I just had a question about automatically switching between modes, you can go into the applications and create what we call overrides. Overrides let you hook into events and make the application do whatever you like. On this one, we have the voice picking override, installed through the Add-On Catalog, which overrides the default picking application so it speaks to me. You can create your own overrides the same way.

This is the override for voice picking, and this is how we built it. After an item barcode is scanned, there’s some logic, and then the voice guidance step speaks the message we’ve defined. You have full access to this application designer. For example, when a bin is scanned you could ask for a number, and you just drag and drop to build up your applications. You also control all the menus and fields used within the applications.

Questions and Answers

We finished the demo a bit early, so I’ll spend the rest of the session answering questions from the chat. We’ve got about 100 of them. If there are specific functionality questions, I’ll jump back into the demo to show them.

Does voice picking require special hardware?

No. As you saw, even the Windows app speaks. If you have a handheld device with a simple Bluetooth headset, it works, and if you just want it to speak over the device speaker, that works as well.

What does the Quality Inspector add-on handle?

It handles pretty much everything you would do in Business Central; the quality inspections basically have to exist. For most of the add-ons in the Add-On Catalog, you can open the documentation link, and it explains how the add-on works and what it does.

When will this be available?

The Windows version will most likely be available in the Microsoft Store within the next week or two. The full version 3 release will probably be in the November timeframe. In general, you can run the new version 3 applications, both the handheld app and the Windows version, against your existing version 2 installs. If you already have Warehouse Insight running, you can try the Windows version against that environment.

It’s compatible the other way around too. If you upgrade Business Central and version 3 gets installed, your version 2 device applications will still work with it. We can’t cover all the bases, and there may be modifications or configurations you have that don’t work quite right, so it’s always best to test before a big upgrade. But in theory everything should work, and you can mix and match version 2 and version 3 applications.

EasyPost changed its terms. Do Dynamic Ship customers still get free labels?

If that has happened to you or a customer of yours, make sure EasyPost knows you’re a Dynamic Ship customer. Dynamic Ship customers get 2,000 free labels a month, regardless of carrier, with no monthly fee and 40% off transaction charges after the first 2,000. It’s counted by shipment, not by label: if you print five labels for one shipment, that counts as one. If you’re not getting that, contact EasyPost, tell them you’re a Dynamic Ship customer, and you’ll get the updated pricing.

Are translations available for voice picking?

Yes, you can add translations. The voice picking add-on doesn’t install its own translations, but it uses the standard translation capability in Warehouse Insight. In the translations area, you create codes, and instead of using fixed text, you use the code, which automatically translates to the language the device is using. The standard install includes translations for a whole bunch of languages. They’re machine generated, so I can’t guarantee they’re all great. You use the same capability in voice guidance: reference the code instead of the text, and it speaks in whatever language the device is set up for.

Can two devices in offline mode pick the same pick ticket?

Yes. Because they’re offline, there’s no way for them to communicate with each other, so two people could pick the same product on the same pick. There’s no way to indicate that user A has picked up the pick document and it’s now assigned to them, so user B could grab the same pick. That’s one of the reasons offline mode is a great safety net but shouldn’t be relied on day to day. You want good Wi-Fi and good connectivity in the facility to prevent issues like this.

Even in the current version, you have the scratchpad, so you can still do your scanning offline. It just doesn’t cache the documents the way version 3 does.

What happens when two people work the same pick online?

Online, you won’t run into collisions. You get real-time feedback that you can’t do something because somebody else already did it. More importantly, there’s a setting that automatically assigns a pick to the person who started it, and another setting that hides it from everyone else’s list. If I start pick number four, it’s assigned to me, and nobody else can work on it because they may not even see it on their screen. That works online because we can communicate with the other devices and Business Central. It doesn’t work offline.

How are errors handled after working offline?

There’s an error log in Business Central for anything that can’t sync, and you also get an error back on the handheld device. The log shows, for example, that this person scanned these items on pick number five and this is the error message Business Central returned. Then you have to figure out how to address it, typically manually. Maybe pick number five was deleted, or everything on it is now blocked or reserved.

Can you use a USB scanner with the Windows version?

Absolutely. Lots of people did that with the old Windows version as well. There’s some setup required: you normally need to configure a prefix and suffix on the USB scanner. That’s really what it’s for. If you’re on a pick cart running a Windows tablet or a laptop, you’ll want a USB or Bluetooth scanner to scan into the application. If you’re using a tablet, you might as well run an Android tablet on that cart.

Does proof of delivery work offline?

Not at the current time, because we don’t cache the tables that proof of delivery needs. In future versions we’re likely to make that configurable, or at least extend the number of tables we cache locally. But again, get a SIM card or a Wi-Fi hotspot rather than relying on offline mode.

What is the upgrade path for existing devices?

Ideally, you switch over in bulk: you install Warehouse Insight version 3 in Business Central and update all your devices to version 3. We have auto update, so even if you’re not running mobile device management, the next time someone logs in on a device running version 2 against a Business Central running version 3, it asks whether to update. If you say yes, it updates the device automatically. For the most part it looks and feels the same as before, so it’s not hard on users. But you’ll want to test everything before a big upgrade like that, and that goes for anything you do in the Business Central world.

Is Quality Inspector a full quality management solution?

Yes. There are a lot of videos and information on it, but it’s full quality management for production, warehouse, shipping, anything you like. The Quality Management module Microsoft released recently is built on our Quality Inspector code, which Microsoft licensed, so it’s a subset of the Quality Inspector functionality. If you start with that and run into a ceiling, there’s basically a one-click upgrade to Quality Inspector, which you can also run on the handheld devices. Check out the website for more.

Can units of measure be set up for different items?

A lot of that is based on Business Central. How you have Business Central set up determines which units of measure you can use and how they’re used. Warehouse Insight supports all units of measure, and the unit of measure can come from the barcode. We can default the put-away unit of measure, the purchase unit of measure on receiving, the sales unit of measure on outbound, and the pick unit of measure, so you have a choice of which unit of measure is used. You can also override the unit of measure directly on the handheld device. How units of measure operate is standard Business Central; we support all of it on the device.

Which warehouse configurations are supported?

Any warehouse configuration you like. I have a few device configurations here, and I can set up any device to use any of them. Some are for the advanced warehouse location, and others are for the blue location, which doesn’t even have bins enabled and might be my retail store. I can run Warehouse Insight in full advanced warehousing mode, with directed put-away and pick, and the stores run a light version for price inquiries, receiving transfer orders, shipping, or inventory counts. By the way, Advanced Inventory Count is ideal for retail locations; it’s what you pretty much have to have to do a good job of counting inventory in a retail store. Any location configuration in Business Central is supported.

Can you see how many pieces a specific location has?

Yes. In item inquiry, I can search for an item or scan it, and it shows all the details, including where it can be found in the warehouse and how many pieces are in each bin. There’s an optional image, and you can print labels from the screen. Item inquiry is available from pretty much any application. If I’m in receiving and want to know more about the 1908-S, I press F4 on the keypad, because F4 is always item inquiry, and it drills down. You can also make the lot number or serial number visible, so you can get a list of all the serial numbers in a specific bin.

Can you scan labels without barcodes to pick up item numbers?

I said you could, but I never showed you, so here it is. We’re on a receipt with items arriving without barcode labels. Ideally your vendors put barcode labels on them, so you can scan a UPC, GS1, or custom barcode; we can read anything. If they don’t, there’s a print button you can make visible, or you can add whatever menu items you like, and print barcode labels directly from the handheld. You can print all the labels for a line, or enter a quantity first and print the number of labels you need.

One step further is scanning the text itself. Here are some barcode sheets, and if I fold them over, I don’t have barcodes anymore, just the text of the item numbers. I point the device at the text, and it’s almost as fast as scanning a barcode. It brings up the item, and because this one shows the picture when receiving, I’d know immediately if it read the wrong text, say a black chair instead of a bunch of shirts, and I can correct it before it propagates. Then it can print the barcodes after the fact if you like.

The same works with lot numbers and serial numbers. Here I have text with an item number and a lot number. It didn’t find a match, so it asked for a cross-reference, because I don’t have a barcode rule set up that says my format is item number, space, lot number. That’s easy to set up; it’s just configuration. Any custom barcode or custom text, we can read into Business Central.

Where can I download version 3?

It’s not officially released. The quickest way to get it is the Windows version through the Microsoft Store in the next week or so, and you can get the Barcode Simulator Power Tool from the Microsoft Store as well. The official release will be in November. If you’re a partner and need it before then, we can potentially set you up with a preview version, but at this point we’re more likely to wait for the final release.

Technical questions

Some of the questions are more technical, and since we’re a bit over time, for any of the more technical questions, send a note to the support team. They’ll be able to help you, although they may not have all the answers on version 3 yet because it hasn’t been officially released.

Is text scanning only available in version 3?

No, it works in version 2 as well, and so does RFID. If you need it, get in touch with us. Text scanning is scanner specific. If you don’t have a device like a CK67 or a Datalogic device, we may not be able to do it, but with one of these newer devices we should be able to help you with text scanning.

How does deployment with mobile device management work?

If you get the MDM licenses through us, we ask for your Wi-Fi details and everything else, and we send you a barcode. You scan that barcode on a factory-reset device or a brand-new device out of the box, tap next a few times, and it appears in the MDM console with Warehouse Insight installed, and optionally kiosk mode to lock it down if you want us to set that up. Then you scan the configuration barcode from Business Central, log in, and you’re good to go.

That’s also how you maintain devices. You can update devices in bulk: with 20 devices, you select them all and send one command to update them. If somebody is having issues, you can remote control the device, and a whole bunch of other things. A lot of configuration that might have been manual can now be automated. If you only have a few devices, it’s still nice, but setting up a device manually only takes about two minutes once you’re used to it, which isn’t much different if you’re doing devices individually.

Can warehouse staff post invoices from the handheld?

Invoicing and shipping are pretty much standard Business Central. From a warehouse perspective, we don’t necessarily want warehouse staff invoicing; we want them to manage shipping while someone in the office does the invoicing. But if you do want warehouse staff to invoice, we have an add-on for that in the Add-On Catalog. Install it, and you can post invoices as well as shipments from the handheld devices.

Is the Windows app available for Business Central version 14?

Technically, it will work with what you have installed on BC14. The BC14 release of version 3 may lag the main release, because anything before version 16 needs a bit of extra time to make sure everything works with those older versions of Business Central. But in theory, the Windows app should work with your current version 14 install.

Is the Honeywell CK65 compatible?

Yes, it’s compatible. For text scanning, unfortunately, it is not.

Closing

I’ve missed quite a few questions. For the questions that remain, you’ll either get an email from us, or, if it’s a very technical question, our support team will be able to help you. Thanks for attending, everyone. I hope that was useful, and I hope you have a great rest of the week.