Warehouse management in Odoo

Warehouse management is often challenging as it revolves around optimising the stock levels, managing the physical space, tracking the orders and deliveries. However, with the expansion and growth of a company, the warehouse challenges gets multiplied as there comes an additional number of warehouses to manage. In Odoo, warehouse constitutes the building or place where the stock items are stocked. You can easily setup odoo warehouse management. In Odoo, you can  set up multiple warehouses and create smooth and transparent moves between the warehouses.

To create a Warehouse in Odoo, go to the inventory module and click on Warehouse Management under the configuration menu and select Warehouses. Then click on Create button. You can add any number of warehouses under your company.

Add the fields in this screen. From the Warehouse configuration tab select one from any of your existing warehouses for re-supply by clicking the Incoming Shipment and Outgoing Shipment option, Then click Save button.

The location is part of the warehouse and you can configure single or multiple locations under one warehouse. Location constitutes a specific space within the warehouse just like a shelf, a floor or an aisle. Through Locations every In and out transactions can carried and recorded.

There are 3 types of locations:

1. Physical Location: These are locations within your warehouse, where the loading and unloading of your warehouse take place. E.g.; Shelf or a department.

2. Partner Location: This location not under your warehouse but space, within a customer or vendor’s warehouse.

3. Virtual Location: This is a virtual location which may not be physically available, but comes handy when you want to place the lost products out of your stock due to inventory loss or when you want to take into account the products that are on their way to your warehouse.

To create a Location, we need to enable storage locations in the inventory settings.

 

To create a new location, go to the inventory module and click on Warehouse Management under configuration menu and select Locations.Then click on Create button.

Type the name of the location in the Location Name field, and select the Parent Location in the list. The parent location can be a physical, partner or virtual location, and you can add as many sub-locations as needed to a location.

You can also fill in the Additional Information fields and add a note to describe your location.

A warehouse also corresponds to a location. As the locations are hierarchical, Odoo will create the parent location of the warehouse, containing all the sub locations in it.

In the Logistics field you can see Removal Strategy and Put Away Strategy.

Removal Strategies can used in warehouse operations to select best products based on certain criteria.These strategies allows you to manage your stock in an efficient way.

 

In this screen you can see two types of Removal Strategy.FIFO and LIFO

• FIFO ( First In First Out ) : A First In First Out strategy can be used in situations where we need to remove the products which are stocked first in our warehouse.
• LIFO (Last In First Out):  last entered product will move out first. It used in case of products which do not have a shelf life.

Put Away Strategies are similar to removal strategies but affect the destination location. By using put away strategies, you can move the products from the receiving location to a particular location. It will done automatically.

Click on Create and Edit to create a new strategy and a new form will appear.

 

After entering all the necessary information, click on Save.

When you purchase products with those categories, they will automatically  transferred to the correct location.

Routes are defined as different possible ways through which a product is acquired or sold from your warehouse. You can see a field asking the Route while creating a Product in Odoo. Route ensures a sale or purchase product is properly tracked.

To create a route click the Create button.

Now you will get the following screen. In this screen you can enter the route name, Select the places where this route selected which is under ‘Applicable on’ title.

Routes might be relevant or not appropriate relying upon the products, the sales order lines, the stockroom, and so on. To satisfy a procurement, the system will scan for rules belonging to routes characterised in particular sale order. A procurement is nothing, but a demand for a particular amount of item to a particular area/location. One in this manner needs to include vital push and procurement rules for making a route. Odoo comes with advanced push/pull routes configuration for easy product management.

 

Procurement Rule: Procurement is the action of obtaining the desired or required amount of product rather than going for bulk. And the procurement inventory control system begins with a customer order. One of the prime advantages the end user can acquire from the procurement rule is that he can evade the possibility of excess inventory. Here, the end user is freed from the management or storing of excess stock. The procurement rule reduces the inventory levels and thereby the cost of storing the goods in the inventory.
To create a Procurement Rule click ‘Add an item’ under the Procurement Rule title.

The following are the fields to add,

Actions: The actions possible in procurement rules are,

• Move from another location rules.
• Manufacturing rules that trigger the creation of manufacturing orders.
• Buy rules that will trigger the purchase order.

Procurement Location: The location in which the procurement is created.
Operation type: Operation type field defines the way in which the pickings are shown in the reports or the views.

Push Rule: Push rules move the given product quantities from the source location to the destination location. Under Odoo,you can set these moves both automatic and manual.

The push rule will automatically create a move towards the next location , if a move foreseen to a location.

Push rules trigger when items enter a particular area. They automatically move the item to another area/location.

The following are the fields to add,

• Operation name: This field contains the name of the push rule which created.
• Source Location: The location in which the rule can applied when a move confirmed.
• Destination Location: The new location where the goods need to go.
• Automatic Move:This field is related to the stock moves, in the case of ‘Manual Operation’ it will create a stock moves after the current one and in the case of ‘Automatic No Step Added’, the location replaced with the original move.
• Operation Type: In this field, one can specify the operation type that will be put on the stock moves.
• Delay: Under the field you can specify the delay needed to transfer the goods.

 

The routes you created by applying appropriate procurement and push rules will be displayed under the inventory tab of product view.

Operation Types helps you to know about the type of operations done in an organisation such as internal transfers,delivery orders etc.

To create an Operation type click on the Create button and add the necessary fields.

Add the operation types name, type of operation, reference sequence and warehouse.

Under Locations, there is two fields to set default source location and destination location.

After entering the fields click Save button to create new operation type.

Incoterms are the International commercial terms. They can used in an assignment of costs and responsibilities between buyer and seller.

By adding a name and code you can create Incoterms.

Once you created click Save button to save.

Hope you understood the concept of odoo warehouse management and how to setup odoo warehouse.