WMS for Dynamics 365 Business Central

This video presents a thorough training session on barcoding and warehouse management within Dynamics 365 Business Central, using Insight Works’ solutions. Mark demonstrates the value of barcoding for inventory accuracy and warehouse efficiency, explores the Warehouse Insight Application Designer and Add-On Catalog, and provides a detailed live demo covering receiving, picking, putaway, and inventory counting.

Introduction to WMS for Business Central

Good morning or afternoon, everybody. This is Mark here. And today we’re going to be going through barcoding and warehouse management within Business Central, of course, using the Insight Works products.

But really what we’re talking about today is barcoding. And so before I jump into the software specifically, let’s talk about why you might want to do barcoding if you’re here. You probably, probably already know that. But really, the bottom line is, you know, you want to keep your physical world, your warehouse, your shop, whatever, in sync with what Business Central thinks is out there, right?

So that you have a high degree of inventory accuracy.

Why Barcoding Matters

So the value in barcoding, as it says down here, is that you get to physically verify everything you do. I pick up this item and I scan it and I know that’s the right item that I’m using. And because of that, you’re not going to get the miss shipments.

You’re not going to receive the wrong product. You’re not going to have, you know, the wrong quantities on the shelf or in the wrong spot. All of that impacts how efficient you are in that work warehouse. Right?

You’re not going to be running around looking for something because it was supposed to be on shelf A and it was put on shelf B. All of that increases dramatically. So you’re going to get much better inventory accuracy, which drives a ton of efficiencies everywhere else. And you’re not going to be able to ship the wrong products or receive the wrong products, things like that.

Right. So obviously, very good reason to. To go barcode.

Barcoding vs RFID

And when I say barcoding, by the way, I’m kind of conflating barcoding and RFID, right?

So RFID has its place. Place as well within these environments for receiving inventory counts, things like that. We’re going to be focusing on barcoding today, though. All right, so you want barcoding, that’s great.

Why Choose Insight Works

Let’s do that. Why would you use Insight Works for doing that? Well, all these reasons here I’m not going to go through in a lot of detail until we get into the demo. But really, you know, it’s comprehensive solution.

And the big one of the big key parts of that is it works with a number of our other solutions. Right? So barcoding is just one aspect of running a warehouse. You need to do fulfillment planning, you need to do purchase planning, you need to do, maybe you’re doing production, you need to do shipping, all of those sorts of things.

So it’s not just that barcoding we’ve got an end to end solution. You can mix and match what you need to use to meet the requirements in your specific facility. We also have a very open platform which allows you to tailor the solution any way you like, build your own applications, plug in applications. We have through our add on catalog.

All of those sorts of things are available as well. And I mentioned we’ve got the barcode support, of course. And when I say universal barcode means any barcode format, you know, any contents of any barcode we can scan and get that information to bc. And we have the RFID support as well.

We’ll cover off the implementation options later, but we can basically walk you through from the start of the project all the way to the end with hardware, software support, all of those sorts of things. So lots of good reasons to look to Insight Works for those solutions.

Fulfillment Process Example

And speaking of those solutions, sort of the end to end, here’s just a really quick example. You know, if we’re talking about the fulfillment process, how do we get stuff out the door?

This is just one process out of many potential processes. Like we might have a receiving process where we do receiving and then quality inspections and putaways and then a bunch of other things. Well, this is the outbound process. So we’re outbound.

You know, we’ve got the order fulfillment worksheet that allows you to automate the creation of picks and shipments and it can tell you hey, what can I pick or ship today? This is almost a must have for any facility where you’re doing any kind of shipping whatsoever. Anyway, once we plan those picks and shipments, it goes out and then it feeds it into Warehouse Insight, which is what we’re going to be looking at today, which is our full WMS or potentially WMS Express. This is our free product.

So if you are only doing sort of the key functions within a facility for barcoding, which is picking or shipping, receiving or put away inventory counts and been to bin movements. WMS Express does all of that stuff for you and it’s free and you can grab it off AppSource, install it and go to town and use it. Okay, so at any rate, we’ve got a couple of options here for, you know, for doing the barcoding. Once we’ve done the barcoding, we send it out to shipping and we’ve got the full Dynamic Ship which can do ltl, parcel, all sorts of stuff.

You can barcode scan things into your packages, all sorts of goodies with that. We also have Order Ship Express which is also free. So Right from within Business Central, you can generate your shipping labels for the carriers of your choice and capture all of the, you know, tracking information and rates and all of those sorts of things. Right from within Business Central.

All right, so that’s just a quick example where we’re focusing on one aspect of this, but there’s a whole bunch of other things that you can incorporate within the solution to do what you need.

WMS Application Licensing

Okay, now those WMS applications I just mentioned, so this is a little breakdown of them. You can go to the website WMS for Dynamics or WMS Express, and it’ll give you all the details about it. One of the limitations on WMS Express is its five concurrent devices per company.

When we say concurrent, that’s devices that are in use at the same time. And by in use, it doesn’t mean logged into the device, it means scanning, actively scanning at the same time. So five devices, five device licenses you get with WMS Express might actually support, you know, 10 physical devices that are being used out in the facility. And that’s per company as well.

All right, so, and by the way, that same licensing applies to Warehouse Insight. So Warehouse Insight, you know, if you have 20 devices, you might only need 10 device licenses because it’s only the devices that are being used simultaneously that count towards your license count.

Mobile Device Hardware Considerations

Now once you’ve got your software, you’ve chosen one of these guys, you need to look at hardware and the hardware.

I’m not going to go into too much detail. You can go to our website and it’s got all sorts of information. It’s got a comparison and a buying guide and all those sorts of things. What we’re going to be focusing on is the dedicated handhelds today.

You see a lot of wearables as well, where you can be effectively hands free with your barcode scanning. You know, there’s also voice options as well. But, you know, dedicated handhelds like the ones pictured over on the right here are pretty typical. The tablets, if you’re using a forklift or a pick cart, those are also very handy and very useful.

And the last one is phones. You know, phones good for, you know, warehouse supervisor that maybe doesn’t need a dedicated scanner, but once in a while needs to go out there and do a quick scan or something like that, or you’re an outside salesperson or you just want to test things out. You can use the phone and the camera and the phone to do the scanning for you. It’s nowhere near as good as these guys, as far as you know, scanning performance.

But it works. It’s. And it’s very valuable in some cases.

WMS Demonstration

What we’re going to do is jump right into the demo and have a look at the software. So we’re going to start out here in Business Central. And, you know, I’m. I’m in the shipping and receiving role center for the Warehouse management system.

And when you’re in that, it’s got this Warehouse Insight menu here after you run the install and do the setup Wizard. And I just wanted to point out a few little things that I mentioned earlier about it being an open platform. So the first thing we’ll look at is this applications. And every application that’s on the device is built inside the Warehouse Insight Application Designer.

WMS Application Designer

These are all the applications, for the most part, that come with Warehouse Insights, Picking movements, all of those sorts of things that come with it. You can come into any of these things and select one of them. You can change the menus that are available, you can change what fields are shown, you can add fact boxes, you can do all that fun kind of stuff. And you can actually create your own applications and design your own applications.

So, for example, this job list application here is one I built. I actually used our Application wizard, which I’ll show you in a sec, to build this application without writing any code. But if I actually want to see what this thing looks like, or if I want to tailor what this job list looks like, by the way, the job list works with the job journal here to actually capture components for job consumption, I can hit this design. And when I do that, it opens up our application designer.

This is actually how we build the applications in Warehouse Insight. It looks like a bunch of Lego blocks. The way it works is I come in here and I can say, hey, you know what? When I scan a license plate palette or container or whatever that license plate represents, I want to do something.

In this case, I’m going to do something that you probably wouldn’t do. But I’m going to say, you know what, when somebody scans a pallet, I’m going to ask them to sign the screen. And if I save this application like this now, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. That’s how we build the applications within the system.

So once you’re used to it, it’s actually very, very easy to design and build these applications within the system. And speaking of this signature capture thing, we actually have a video on the website and on YouTube that goes through how you can use the application designer to add signature capture to any application. I think we use the Warehouse shipment application illustrated, but shows you how to use it. All right, so anyway, that’s a little on the application designer there and the applications.

The other thing that we have available is that application wizard I mentioned. And the application wizard allows you to just walk through next, next, next type of environment to build your own applications. And the job consumption application, a requisition worksheet application, physical inventory recording application. Those are all applications I’ve built with this application wizard without writing any code whatsoever.

And we do also have a video on our website and on YouTube that kind of walks through how you can use this application wizard to extend existing applications as well, to create drill downs and show more information, all sorts of things. So very accessible, very easy to use. Typically it’s your partner or us doing the work for you to build these applications, but you have the ability to do these yourself. Now the last thing I’ll mention, maybe you’re coming in there and you’re saying, yeah, that’s great, but I don’t want to build my own applications, I just want this thing to work well.

We also have an add on catalog available in this release as well. And the add on catalog is a list of all the applications that we’ve built or partners have built and we’ve published here that you can just install directly into Warehouse Insight. Okay, so there’s a few here published for the initial release and there’s another dozen or so coming here shortly. But what these are, you know, like you can see this, this is just allowing me to enter a location on the ad hoc move without scanning or I want to update, you know, all the place lines with a bin code and things like that.

So all these little sort of tools that you can plug in, like being able to choose a printer that you want to print to these things that you may want to use within Warehouse Insights. You can just grab these, hit install and it will actually install that application and it’ll be available on the scanner for you. And there’s a couple of big guys in here. So we’ve got our Proof of Delivery application, which there’s a video on that as well.

Full blown Proof of Delivery application. You can just plug into Warehouse Insight and guess what? You can now do Proof of Delivery and the fixed asset count. So you can go ahead and install that.

And now you can generate barcodes for your fixed assets count. Your fixed assets do all those sorts of things. And if you need more information about any of these applications, you can come in here, click this, hit documentation. And in the case of some of these, what it’ll do is it’ll take you to our external repository.

So this is really an open source, sort of an open source code repository that you can come in. If you wanted to install this manually or go in and dig into what all of these things do, you can come in here and it’s got all the details of those applications for you. And in the case of proof of delivery and fixed asset count and things like that, all of the AL code is available for you as well. So you can take these applications, download the source, do whatever you like with, and then have your own applications that you publish.

So it’s a very open platform. We provide you all the source everything else. If you don’t care about the source code or doing your own development, you can come into the add on catalog, grab one of these guys, hit install and it’ll install everything you need to move forward. All right, now after all that you might be thinking, well, you know, that’s a lot of work just to get into, you know, scanning barcodes.

Well, the nice thing is that’s all additional stuff. Of course, when you first set up Warehouse Insight and get it all running, every application you need to actually manage your warehouse is already pre installed and ready to go. And we’ll work with any configuration within Business Central. So it doesn’t matter if you have no bins, like maybe a retail outlet and you don’t use bins in retail where you’re a small shop or it’s a tool crib or something like that where you’re not going to use bins all the way up to directed put away and pick where you have full bin control and full document control and all of those sorts of things.

We can work with any of those configurations. And what does it look like when you first install Warehouse Insight? Well, you saw some of those applications I showed you there, but what does it look like on the device? Well, to show you what that looks like, I’m going to bring up my device.

So this is the device that I have in my hand and there is the device that I have in my hand. So let’s just let this thing focus here. So this device, this is a pretty typical device. I’ve got a pistol grip on it, you know, running the full Warehouse Insight.

So this is running the full Warehouse Insight and these are all the applications you get on that device. So the applications that are showing here by the Way over on the side here, that’s on my messy desk, that’s just some items that I need to receive later. But over here we’ve got, you know, the full warehouse inside applications and these are all the ones that come pre installed. So everything you need to do in the, in your facility is available and ready to go as soon as you run your setup wizard after you install it from AppSource.

By the way, this guy here just is another style of device, slightly smaller device but nice little unit that I’ll illustrate some things on in a bit. Now the applications that we have here, I’ll just run through, you know, some of these guys and then we’ll, we’ll jump in and see what they look like. So the first ones are inquiry apps. I can scan a barcode, tells me what it is, item number, lot number, serial number, bin code, license plate, whatever.

And it’ll give me information about those, those applications or about that barcode that I’ve scanned. This can also be used as a drill down so that if I’m in picking as an example and I want to find out more information about the item I need to pick, I can drill down right from there into the inquiry mode to get that detail. We’ve got two ways of doing inventory counts. We’ve got our advanced inventory count, definitely worth looking at if you’re doing any kind of cycle counting or you know, full physical counts.

You want the advanced count but we also work with the physical inventory journal, right to scan directly into that. And as I mentioned earlier, I used our app wizard to create a, an app for the physical inventory order stuff if you want to use that as well. It’s a little, you know that that module within VC is maybe a little tougher to use. I would recommend using the advanced inventory account.

We’ll have a look at that later.

Additional Features

And then I’ve got, you know, all the other sort of standard capabilities within Business Central. So I’m set up for sort of the advanced warehousing on this device. So I’ve got, you know, my receiving and put away, but we can just have inventory put aways or just received directly to a, a, a purchase order if you like.

We’ve got picking and shipping, so I’ve got my warehouse picks, my warehouse shipments. I’ve got the ability to do sort of on the fly movements, these ad hoc movements. So I can just scan items and bins and move them around the warehouse or I can generate warehouse movements or inventory movements to move product around the warehouse. I can also do Production activities on here.

So I can do consumption and output directly on the handheld device or tablet or whatever you need at the production line or at the production area. And I can do assemble to stock and assemble to order as well on, on the device. And finally, license plating here allows me to combine multiple items under a single barcode. So this is typically used for outbound processing.

Right. So I’m building up pallets or boxes that I need to ship and I can build up those pallets while I’m picking or while I’m shipping or anything like that. Or I can just build up a pallet right in the middle of the warehouse without having any document to associate it with. But again, typically it’s used for outbound processing.

You can do it at receiving, you can build up your own pallets for receiving, things like that. And usually we use that when we have mixed pallets, mixed lot numbers, mixed serial numbers, things like that on a pallet. And we also support the Business Central package number capability, which isn’t officially released yet, but it’s, it’s available to play with. We support that package number capability where if you want to track individual cartons, we can do that as well without using the license plates if you don’t want.

Again, these other apps here are ones that I’ve created myself with the Application wizard or the Add on catalog. And that’s basically how that works. Those are the applications.

Receiving Process

Let’s actually jump in and see what some of these things look like.

I’m going to start with receiving. I’m going to open up my receiving app and what it does, it gives me a list of all the purchase orders in the system that I can receive against. And it’s annoying me that it’s not focusing, but that’s okay. You can see everything you need on the screen.

It’s probably this guy here. It’s preventing the focus. Oh, look at that now. It’s awesome.

Okay, so gives me a list of all the purchase orders that I can receive in the system. But one of the nice things is again, it’s very tailorable and customizable. Normally you do all that tailoring and customizing inside Business Central. Like here, I’m showing the purchase order number and the vendor name.

I could also show the warehouse receipt if you’re using those instead of this, or both the warehouse receipt and the purchase order number, or who it’s assigned to, all sorts of information. I can set that up inside Business Central and everybody that logs in gets that information. But hey, I’m special I want to see special things. So for me, I can tap the screen and when I do that, I can hit this, choose columns, and I can come in here and I can choose anything I want to show on that screen.

Well, anything that we’ve set up within Business Central shows up for me to select. So if I wanted to see the expected receipt date on there, I could select that, make it visible. And I’ve tailored the experience to my specific requirements. So you can do that on a per user basis or per device basis if you like.

Now, for me, this is fine. I’m going to come in here, I’m going to use my physical keypad to hit the down arrow to choose that peel. I could tap the screen, I can use the menu, all that kind of stuff, but I use a physical keypad to choose it, open it up by hitting the enter key, and here’s the purchase order that I need to receive. And now we’ve got a few options here.

Number one is we’re talking about barcoding. So ideally I’ve got barcodes I can scan, right? The vendors put barcodes on the boxes, like this guy here or the manufacturer, and I can just start scanning barcodes. That, that would be the ideal situation.

Now if that’s not possible, I can also come in here and I can print my own barcodes at this point if I like. So using our Print Node connector, which is a free tool, and our barcode generator tool, which is also free, I can generate my own item labels, print out whatever I like, or print a copy of the PO or whatever I want from this print menu. So I can do all that kind of stuff from here as, as well. Or if I, I’m receiving things like packaging or something that I’m never going to barcode, I could just use this change quantity capability and without scanning anything, I could still enter what I’m receiving without actually scanning barcodes.

And you have control over this at a item category level or per item level where I can say, hey, this type of item I’m allowed to enter the quantity without scanning a barcode. Everything else I need to scan a barcode for. So you’ve got lots of control over that. But in my case, clearly I’ve got, I’ve got some barcodes.

So basically I grab an item, scan the barcode on that box, it finds it. Wow, that’s a small box for a chair. But maybe it’s a toy chair or something. So it popped up a picture of that item for me.

So that’s handy, right I scan a small little white box and it shows me a picture of a chair. Maybe I’ve got a problem with the barcode. Maybe the cross reference in Business Central is wrong or something like that. So I’ve got that visual verification at any point within the system to make sure I’m doing the right thing.

Now, in this case, let’s say I found one of these because that’s all I scan. So I enter one and it’s updated Business Central with that quantity and I’ve got 13 left to find. As far as that quantity goes, I can also set it up on a per item basis as well, or item category, where if I scan that barcode, it would just automatically grab a quantity of 1 and reduce this quantity and I’d never see that quantity dialogue pop up at all. I can also default in the unit of measure or change the unit of measure as I’m receiving all of those sorts of things as well.

Okay, now the other thing I can do is this is an item that’s got a serial number associated with it. So I’m going to scan, you know, the item number and it pops up. And because this barcode didn’t have the serial number in it, it’s prompting me now to either enter the serial number or scan a secondary barcode for that serial number. So I can just scan that serial number as a second scan hit.

Okay, And I’ve now got that serial number tracked within Business Central. So the other thing that we can do when we’re talking about lot numbers is we have scanners available. If you don’t have barcoded lot numbers, this is pretty typical in foods and things like that where I don’t have that lot number in a barcode, but it’s printed on the packaging. We’ve got scanners that can actually scan that text OCR as fast as scanning a barcode and bring that lot number in and expiration date and everything else.

And again, we don’t care what’s in the barcode. Could be simple barcodes like the ones on that packaging, could be a GS1 barcode, could be a custom barcode. We don’t really care. We can scan anything.

So what I’m going to do now is I’m going to scan an item with a lot number. And you can see this is a barcode sheet that was generated with our barcode generator tool. There’s a sample barcode list you can use to create, you know, test barcodes or whatever you like. And I’m going to scan this guy it’s got the item number and lot number in the same barcode.

And when I do that again, it finds the item. It knew the lot number because it was in the barcode. But now it’s prompting me for the package number. I’ve made that mandatory at at receipt.

So I now actually need to scan or enter the carton number that I’m receiving. And again, you can turn this, this is based on the item tracking codes in Business Central. You can turn any of these things on or off and away I go. But everything you see on the screen could have come in from that barcode, right?

Lot number, package number, expiration date, quantity, unit of measure could have all been brought in from that single barcode scan. And as I mentioned earlier, I can change the unit of measure on the screen and set it to whatever I like or we can default it in from the barcode or from the put away unit of measure or purchase unit of measure, whatever you like. It’s all configurable. All right, so in my case I’m just going to come in here and say receive 22 that particular lot number.

And it’s like everything else, it’s updated Business Central and we’re good to go. That is, that’s it. You scan a barcode, optionally enter quantity and we’re good to go. And by the way, if I find more of that first one that, you know, 1964 up at the top there I come in.

If I found now five more in a different box and enter that, it’s just going to keep updating Business Central and reducing the outstanding quantity until I’ve done the full receipt of that item. Okay, that’s basically it. Now a couple other things we can do on receiving here is you know, that license plate. So if I wanted to receive all of these onto a palette, I can start that license plate.

Or what we often recommend is you just have a bunch of pre printed license plate labels. I scan it and then everything that I receive after that is stored on that license plate. I’ve got that single barcode I can use to move that into the warehouse and to, you know, move it into production or move it over to shipping or all those sorts of things. So that license plate capability is there throughout the system, including at receiving.

The other thing I can do on receiving is I’ve got this ability to take a photo that’s a standard menu action you can enable on any application within the system. So we typically see it at receiving and shipping. So receiving, I’m coming in here and you know, one of these boxes was damaged or something like that. Using the camera on the device, I can come in, take a photo of that, and that will automatically upload and attach to the purchase order for me.

So now if I’ve got damaged product or if I scan a barcode and it’s the wrong item or something like that, I can take those photos. And the purchaser now has everything they need to start a claim with the vendor or the carrier or whatever we need to do. Okay, so that’s a quick overview of receiving. It’s pretty straightforward.

Scan a barcode, good to go, right? All right. And oh, incidentally, I do have the ability to do a couple of things or three things. One is as soon as I leave the screen, it could automatically post that receipt for me, or I can manually post the receipt here, or you can turn off both those options if you don’t want your receivers actually doing the posting.

They can record all the quantities and we can post in Business Central if you prefer. One last thing. This is actually a warehouse receipt, right? I chose a purchase order, but it either found an existing warehouse receipt for it or created a new warehouse receipt for me on the fly to receive all of these items against that warehouse receipt.

All right, Anyway, that is receiving pretty straightforward. Now, after I’ve done receiving, you know, typically what I would then do is I would do the putaways, while I might do a quality inspection after receiving, we’re at a great quality inspector app that you can use for receiving inspections and things like that. But then I typically do a put away and the putaways and picks look and work pretty much identically. The difference is the away, like the little arrow shows you there.

I’m putting something onto a shelf and the pick, I’m taking something off the shelf. But otherwise they pretty much work the same way. So I’ll show, I’ll jump into picks and show you how those work and you’ll get the idea for putaways.

Picking Process

So when I go into the pick screen, same concept, I get a list of all the picks in the system.

When I come in here, it gives me a list of all the picks available in the system, either assigned to me or open for anybody to, to choose. And you can set it up to auto assign. So as soon as I choose this pick, it assigns it to me so I know who’s working on it. Everything else.

Now, typically most people will still print a paper copy of the pick ticket. And that’s because, hey, after I’ve finished picking this and I’ve dropped it off at shipping or production or wherever it’s going. I leave that piece of paper there so they know what the heck I just dropped off at their feet. But you can go paperless as well, right?

Because I can just choose one of the picks on the list here. And of course the ability to show additional information on the screen would allow me to do things like show which carrier this order is going out to or custom priority field or something like that. I can actually use this as a dispatch list to go paperless to do my picking if you really want it. But again, most people print a paper copy the pick, they’re going to scan the barcode on it, it opens it up.

But for me, I’m going to come in, choose pick number four. Again, I just use the down arrow keypad there, but I’m going to choose pick number four, open that up and it’s not going to be rocket magic here. Kind of like the receipt, it shows me everything I need to receive. In this case, I’ve got the bin code visible, of course, because I need to know where to find that item.

If you don’t have bins enabled, you just won’t see this field. You might see the shelf number field if you prefer, or something like that. On the receiving side you can also make the bin visible. But you know, I was using the default receipt bin, so I don’t really need to see it.

So here, this view gives me a list of all the bins I need to go to, the items, the quantities, units of measure, all that kind of stuff. And this gives me a lot of flexibility and a lot more context about what I’m supposed to do. Right. I can sort, if I had maybe added a weight field on there, I can sort by any field I want within the the environment.

You know, the default sort order is going to come based on whatever you’ve set up the to pick for in Business Central. But here’s, you know, here’s everything. I can start picking anywhere I like. I can see everything.

I’m supposed to do all that kind of stuff. There is another option though, if you prefer sort of the older style view of picking, I’ll just show you on this device here, actually I can bring up the screen as well. On this device here we’ve got, I’ve got it set up a little different, it’s the same location everything else. But I’ll come in here and I’ll choose this, this pick number four.

Again, same thing. The difference is I’ve got this Set up to use the card view. And the card view shows me one item at a time. So it’s showing this first item at a time.

Once I’ve fully picked this, it’ll automatically move me to the next line to pick and so on and so forth. And on this one I’ve also thrown in a couple fact boxes at the bottom here. So these fact boxes you can enable in any view on receiving, picking, shipping, wherever you want the. And you can put whatever you want in these guys.

So I’ve added the line comments and item image on here. If I want to see the picking comments, I can just double tap and it brings up all the comments. Or if I want to see a big picture of the guy, I can do that. And again, whether it’s just change this to this, whether it’s landscape or portrait, you can see that information there.

So this is great for tablets, right? If I’m on a pick cart, I can have this set up, I can have, have tons of information here. You can make these bigger on a, on a tablet because you got more real estate, all that kind of stuff. So anyway, that’s, that’s the card view interface.

And those fact boxes also work. Those fact boxes, of course also work on the grid view. Right. If I go into landscape mode, I’ve got fact box set up that shows me picture only if I’m in landscape mode.

Okay. So anyway, lots of different things you can do there for how you tailor what the screen looks like. While I’m doing the picking. Here I am, I’m ready to start my picking.

So the way it works is I’ve got it set up so that the bin is technically optional and by what that means is I can just start scanning items at this point. But normally the behavior is we want to scan the bin to identify, you know, we want that inventory accuracy. So we want the system to, you know, verify that we’re at the bin that we’re supposed to be at. That I didn’t just find a bunch of these sitting in the receiving area.

So the first thing I do typically is I come in, I, I find my bin, scan my bin code that I’m at. It tells me at the bottom which bin I’m at. And then I scan the item that I’m picking out of that, that particular bin. So let me just find my item that I need to pick out of that particular bin here, we’ll do this guy here and where we go and it pops up a picture again if you like.

And I enter the quantity I picked. I’m just going to hit enter and I’m done. I’ve completed that. And you’ll notice here it says zero.

This line is completed, but it’s still visible on the screen. If I don’t want to see that there is an option, I can just hit hide completed, and it remembers that. And now this list just gets shorter and shorter as I complete this pick. So those are the, you know, two of the ways we can do the picking.

One is sort of the card view that you saw, and the other is the grid view. That’s basically it, right? Scan a barcode, optionally enter quantity, and I’m good to go. And lot numbers, serial numbers, all those sorts of things work the same way as you saw in receiving.

Scan the barcode and where we go. Now, let’s say I get to one of these items, maybe this guy here, and I can’t find that item in this particular bin. Well, what do you do? Do you write it on the back of your hand and run into the office and an hour later and try and figure out what the heck you scribbled on on your arm?

Or do you actually try and use this system because you got this computer in your hand? Let’s use this to help make decisions out there in the shop floor. So what I’m going to do, show you the menu item. Oops, I’ll show you the menu item here.

It’s this item inquiry that I’m going to use. But you’ll notice I’ve got a hotkey set for that as F8. You can set your own hotkeys, but there’s a bunch of standard ones that come. And I’m just going to hit the F8 key on my keypad and I’m going to drill down to that item.

And what that does is it opens up the item inquiry and gives me all the information about that item, including the image and where else I might be able to find that in the warehouse. And if you’re in foods or something like that, where you’re looking for the oldest product, we can make the expiration date visible and all that kind of stuff on here. And you can use this to find an alternate bin to pick from. Or if you may be a warehouse supervisor and wondering why the heck you’re supposed to have 86 there and there aren’t any in that bin.

I can come in, I can look at recent transactions. Maybe there’s another pick in the system, and that’s Joe, and he picked a case instead of an each and I’m going to hunt him down and get my stuff back and do other nasty things or maybe it was put away wrong or something. So I can use this to actually make those decisions out there in the shop floor or at minimum come in here and get a lot more insight into what’s going on in the warehouse. Okay, so that drill down is actually very handy, but otherwise picking again, very simple.

Bin, item, optional quantity and I’m good to go. And then there’s a whole bunch of other options. If you don’t like the bin that it’s sending you to, you can change the bin, you can split the line, pick some from one bin, another, all sorts of things you can do there. Down here, this tool picking, that’s if you’re, you’re picking multiple orders on the same warehouse pick, we can do tote assignments.

So you can scan like a picking cart barcode. So you create a barcode for your picking cart. You can scan that and maybe that barcode or that that picking card has eight slots on it or eight totes on it. We can assign those totes to the individual orders on this pick document.

And when I scan an item it’ll say oh, that items for sales order X, put that in position three or tote three on your picking card. So it’ll direct you to segregate those items items out properly as you’re scanning them on the pick document. So that when you get over to shipping, if you’re using Dynamic Ship, I just scan that tote, it says, oh, that’s order X, here’s all the items you picked for it, let’s ship them out for you. So it does have that tote picking to help you segregate the items for batch picks while you’re doing the picking.

And if you prefer to do your packaging while you’re picking, there’s that license plate capability again, right. So again, typically if you’re doing this while you’re picking, I would use a bunch of pre printed license plate labels. If I’m going out there and driving down the aisle with a forklift and I’m going to build up a pallet as I go, or a big box or something like that, I scan the license plate. Now everything I scan from that point on goes into that license plate.

So now when I get over shipping and I’ve got this pallet or this box with these items in it, I can scan those onto the truck or I can use that to get my bill of lading or get my, my shipping labels or whatever I Need from there. So we can actually package while we’re picking. And of course you can also use this on the shipping side to package up while we’re shipping as well. And you can do it within Business Central using Dynamic Ship to build up those packages and get your shipping labels and get your LTL rates and all those sorts of fun stuff as well.

Finishing Picking

Yeah, that, that’s it for picking, right? Bin item quantity or again you want to do it the old way and use a card view, you know, same thing, item or bin item quantity and it moves you to the next line and away you go. And same thing, when I leave this screen, it can automatically register that pick or I can come in here and post that pick manually. Again, what I’ve been working on, just to clarify, this is a warehouse pick, right?

So if you don’t use warehouse picks, maybe use inventory picks or maybe you pick directly against the sales order. Doesn’t matter. Work all works the same way, the same concepts. Min item quantity applies to everything.

User interface looks the same and you’re good to go. So it’ll work the same way every, every week. Okay. All right.

Now once I’ve, once I’ve done that, that pick, typically I go over to shipping. I’m not going to get into that today. And by the way, there’s very good videos on license plating. If you want more information on license plating, there’s a good video on, on the details of how that works.

There’s also good videos on our website on the shipping side of it, you know, ltl parcel, all those sorts of things. So, you know, I’ll leave you to look at those on your own after this if you’re interested. Same thing on the output and consumption. There’s some good videos on that.

We’ve got an advanced consumption capability where we extend the standard Business Central traceability capabilities with our consumption and there’s a video on output and how you can do certain things in there.

Inventory Counting

So what I’m going to do though is I’m going to just jump into the inventory calc side. I think things here real quick to show you that. So on the inventory account, there’s really three ways you can do account.

One is you can go in there and a supervisor that has the right permissions can pick up a scanner and without going in Business Central, they can start an inventory count, do a quick ad hoc cycle count, review the differences on the device and post those differences on the device so that can be set up for you. The other two ways is one, I Go into Business Central. Both, both the other two ways of going to Business Central. And then the one way is I set up what we call count sheets.

Account sheet is just somebody or a team of people that are using a scanner to do the inventory count. So in this case I’ve got these three teams set up. You can ignore the recount stuff, but team two, I’ve told them that there’s 90 different items they need to go out and count. So I’ve given them a list of items to count.

And that’s typically used when you’re doing cycle count, Right. So you can do a cycle count and say give me 90 random items to count or give me all my items from vendor A, or give me all my fast moving items to count or whatever criteria you want. It’ll generate a list of those items and then somebody will go out and find those items and count them. The other way to do it is what I’ve done with team one, where I haven’t told them what to count.

So this is typically used when you’re doing a full physical count or if you’re doing a cycle count by, you know, aisle or bin or something like that. I just toss the scanner at somebody and say, hey, go count everything in aisle one. And they don’t know what’s supposed to be there. The system isn’t telling them what items might be in that aisle.

They’re just going to go out and scan everything they find. Right. They’re going to scan what’s actually there and then business Central will tell us where the discrepancies are. So for me, if, now if you were here physically, I’d throw a scan.

Well, I wouldn’t throw a scanner at you. I’d give you a scanner and say, hey, go do an inventory account and you’d be able to do it. Why? Because it’s so simple.

It’s exactly the same way everything else works in the system. So I’m going to open up team one here and it starts out blank because, you know, there’s nothing. I haven’t told them what to count. They’re going to walk down the aisle and they’re going to go to their first bin, they need to count and they’re going to count the item they found in that first bin and they’re going to say I found 245 of that lot number and that’s it.

So it’s been item quantity. It’s the same, you know, process everywhere you go. It’s again, if you don’t use Bins, you just scan the item and enter the quantity or the shelf number and enter the quantity, things like that. All sorts of fun stuff you can do here.

You can segregate a bin into smaller portions if you’re counting a bulk storage area. All sorts of goodies you can do. But that’s it, right? I scan, I scan the bin barcode.

I can have it remember the bin between scans, you know, scan the item I’m counting. You know, I can optionally look at the picture and enter what I’ve counted. And that’s how I do my inventory count. Really simple.

And now in Business Central, I can go in and actually do the reconciliation on this and it will reconcile those lot numbers for me automatically and serial numbers. So when I go in there, it’ll say, hey, you counted an extra 245 of this lot number and you’re short 200 of this other lot number. And it’ll tell me at the lot number level or serial number level where I’ve made my mistakes and will actually put those item tracking lines on the journals for me automatically. So, you know, standard Business Central, it doesn’t want to know which lot numbers you didn’t count, it wants to know which lot numbers you did count.

Which means If I’ve got 100, you know, of a lot number in stock or 100 lot numbers in stock, and I count 80 of those, I have to manually figure out which 20 I didn’t find. Right. You don’t want to have to do that. You use the advanced inventory count, which is what we’re looking at here, and it’ll go in and do that reconciliation for you automatically, and it’ll handle a whole bunch of other stuff, like doing recounts.

So that sheet that I had earlier, if I want to do a recount, it can automatically generate a list of items to recount those sorts of things. And by the way, if I do specify a list of items for somebody to count, guess what? It’s exactly the same. I go in there and, you know, I should have a poll.

Everybody put up their hand. How do you do account if I’ve given you a list of items? Yeah, you scan bin item, enter quantity. The only difference is it updates the quantity online.

But yeah, you scan the, the bin, the item quantity, and you’re good to go. Simple as that. All right, so that, that’s really how this stuff works on the scanners. So with that, let’s jump back in and you can listen to me talk a little bit more on the PowerPoint.

Conclusion and Next Steps

So that was really cool. I think, you know, that’s a really powerful system. We only looked at like three small portions of it, but it can do a lot, right? Even in those three applications that you saw, it’s very powerful, very easy to use, very easy to get started.

So let’s say you do want to get started. How do you do that? Well, we have really three different ways you can, you can implement Warehouse Insight or WMS Express. One is, you know, you can do time and material and usually we’ll do that if it’s a very complex project, right?

Like if you’re looking at, you know, deploying 100 devices or 150 devices or whatever, we’ll probably come in there and do a, a bit of a larger scope project. But maybe you want to try and do this yourself and you want to implement Warehouse Insight yourself and try and get it working. If you contact us for help during that project, then we’ll just do it as time material and charge you whatever hours you need for us to consult on getting that up and running. The other option is your fixed price.

And we have two options for fixed price. We have what we call a rapid implementation and our Quick Start. The rapid implementation right now I think is about 7k and the quick start is $1500. That’s all it costs you to get going.

And if you want to use the Quick Start, there’s some very specific things, prerequisites you need to have. So the Quick Start, you have to be on BC Cloud, right? Because we don’t want to have to have the hassle of trying to connect to your on PREM system or anything like that. But if you’re on BC Cloud and you’re already live on Business Central, that’s the key thing.

You’re already live with Business Central and you’re using it the way you want to use it. Like you’ve already decided using Warehouse Picks or you already decided using Inventory Pick. So you’ve got your bin set up, you’re all good to go. All you want to do is add barcoding into the mix and you don’t want to change any of your processes or add license plating.

All you want to do is, hey, this is how I work. But I now want to start barcoding. That’s kind of what the Quick Start is for. And you have to have a device that we, you know, we can support.

So one of the ones you see here that, that we can either supply for you or if you have them already, if it’s one of these Devices, then you can do the, the quick start. And the quick start again applies to Warehouse Insight or WMS Express. We help you set up the device, we do the, the initial configuration, the basic training, and you’re usually up and running like you’ll be scanning within an hour, but you’re usually up and running within a couple of days on this, this approach here. All right, so we finished that in record time.

I talked really fast. The big coffee I have beside me really, really held up today. If you do need more information, go to wmsfordynamics.com that’s the Warehouse Insight or WMS Express, to see what it’s capable of. Because almost everything I showed you today, actually everything I showed you today, other than, you know, taking the photo, you can do within WMS Express, right?

So receiving, picking, inventory counts, that kind of stuff WMS Express can do. So have a look at that because it is free and it’s worth looking at. But those are the two ones you go to. Or you can go to the main website, check out all the different applications we talked about.

And again, there’s tons of videos on license plating, on the application designer, application wizard, all of those sorts of things. If you go to our knowledge base, that’ll get you information on the, you know, how to do development and configuration and all those sorts of things. Again, that add on catalog that you saw. If you click on the documentation for that, that’ll take you to the code for all those applications, you know, if you want to see how it all works together.

We do support RFID primarily. We use that for receiving and inventory counts. And the reason for that is, you know, and we will have a webinar on RFID here coming up in the next little while because we want to do it in bulk. And picking through RFID is challenging because it picks up everything around the bin you’re at.

But yes, for receiving and inventory counts and potentially shipping, we do support RFID. And just for fun, I’ll show you. You know, this is an RFID. That’s not the device I wanted to grab, but anyway, yeah, RFID devices like this and we can support those handheld devices for RFID.

If you need, you know, a fixed RFID terminal, then we’ll, you know, help get you in touch with an automation provider that can do sort of the gateways and things like that. Again, if you have any other questions, contact us on our website and check out the videos and the knowledge base and everything else and hopefully we’ll be talking again soon. All right, thanks everybody. Hope you have a great rest of the week.