Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central | Demo for Inventory Sites

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central | Demo for Basics of Inventory Sites

Hello and welcome to another video on Dynamics 365 Business Central. My name is John Hoyt, Solutions architect here at TMC and in this video we’ll be taking a look at the basics of inventory sites in Business Central. The basics of inventory site starts with locations both physical and virtual and that can include bins.

Let’s get started.

So I’m logged in right now in Business Central as the business manager role and I want to switch that we’re going to use the inventory manager role instead for this video and to start with locations we need to first start inside inventory setup and just make sure that we tell the business central system that we are now going to make location mandatory inside the system. What this is going to do is direct the user for each activity or transaction that involves inventory. What location are we working with. Let’s get a little bit more specific. Once that change has been made then the next thing we need to do is set up the locations themselves and you can have an unlimited number of locations you know east coast warehouse, west coast warehouse, north, south, main satellite- how ever you want to organize them. Those locations can also get used in other parts of the system like things for work centers inside the manufacturing operations etc. In this case we want to take a look at WMS1 location and there’s a couple of different things we’re going to do here to enable the location functionality to enable the bin functionality and really to direct the policies of how we’re going to act within that specific location, because as we create multiple locations.

In business central, they can have different purposes. They can be used for specific functions or activities and then all of the transaction types within that location can have specific um you know definitions to them that’s going to include things like when we get into the warehouse itself. Do I want to require a specific receive activity or do I want that to simply be part of the automatic posting of the receipt transaction? You know is that required? Is that not required? The same thing with put aways or with picks things of that nature. We will specify if we’re going to be using bins and the bins are simply a way to get more specific inside the physical location itself. I’m going to divide it up actually into a couple of different ways.

The first way that I can divide that up is to create zones and the zones are not physically defined areas. They’re virtual areas inside the location but they are used for specific activities I can have a picking zone I can have a receiving zone, I can have a shipping zone, and then specify perhaps that there’s equipment that’s necessary to be used in those locations. That’s part of the advanced warehouse functionality and we’ll talk about that in a future video. In addition to those virtual zones dedicated to the specific activities picking and receiving and shipping etc. You can also set up specific rack and bin information and I’ve got an illustration of that here where, I have physically divided up the warehouse into aisles into racks and into bins and now I’m going to create bins with those locations as part of the code for them. This is a pretty straightforward approach to how you could number or layout your warehouse uh there are obviously lots of other ways that this could be done uh could also be done in a machine readable format that is. I could use some type of a barcode scanner and simply put labels at each one of my bin locations and instead of asking the user to enter in or pick from this list of locations they could use that piece of equipment and simply do the activity with that barcode location.

So once I have the bin set up and I have the zone set up I’ve now created essentially a physical location I can also create in transit locations. Locations that I would use to represent goods that are being moved from one warehouse to another, the in transit locations allow me to specify that it’s a non-pickable location. It’s not available to go out on sales orders today but it’s visible as being within the system. I can have an expected delivery date as it processes through that in transit location but I know the count, I know the value. I have complete visibility into where my goods are just by using that in transit location and I’ll take us back to our home page.

So that’s really the basics for getting things set up. So we looked at the setup of the inventory module to enable the use of locations inside Business Central, we saw how locations both physical and virtual whether it’s an in-transit or it’s a zone are managed then by directing the specific tasks and activities that would be required there the movements the receipts the shipments put aways etc.

WE talked about how you can create zones dedicated to specific activity types like shipping and receiving. You can lay out a bin in your Business Central system to replicate what you have done in the physical location in terms of aisles and racks and bins and then with both location and bin enabled. We’ll now direct employees to put material away in a specific location go back to that location for cycle counting and when it comes time to pick and fulfill orders we can again direct the employee to a specific location at that bin level to find the material that they’re looking for.

That’s it for this video thanks for watching. There are many other videos in this series and we will keep adding more including an advanced warehouse functions video. If you have any questions or would like to make a suggestion on what we should cover in the next video please add a comment down below. I’ll do my best to answer your comments but if you need any immediate technical support, I invite you to visit our website www.abouttmc.com . Also don’t forget to like this video and subscribe to our channel we really appreciate it.