Using Pallets to Better Control Your Inventory

So you order 48 blue widgets from your widget supplier.  He sends them to you on pallets of 12 each. You’ve scanned each one’s serial# and received them into inventory.  Now, you have 48 in your inventory.

You decide to re-arrange your warehouse, and as a result, you need to move half of the blue widgets to a different location.   So, you go on your merry way, doing individual inventory movement from one location to the other for each serial#. Or, you do bulk item movement, but have to reference every serial#.  Maybe you do a transfer order, but performing the same thing, referencing each serial# you are transferring.

It can be quite tiring, referencing/entering/scanning all of those serial#s to move them from one place to another.

Ascent now has two ways to make the pallet movement or location to location movement more palatable (pun intended).

You can simply use the Ascent Mobile Menu and choose Move Pallet.   Scan/enter the pallet ID, the location you wish to move it to, and confirm.  It will move the pallet, inventory quantity, and all the serial#s on that pallet to the new location.  That’s nice if you have 50 serial#s on that pallet.

Let’s use a smaller example.  You’ve got 16 motors, all serialized, on 4 pallets in a single location.

Now, you want to move Pallet P-03133 from Carolina Farm to Virginia Farm.  You could use Item Movement on the Item Master tab, but then you’d have to reference each serial#.  Good, but there’s better.

Try the Move Pallet on the Mobile Menu.  The process looks like this:

Select Move Pallet:

Then, scan or enter the pallet ID (P-03133) and hit Next:

You are now shown what item (409cm1), lot (03202018409cm1 and qty (14) are on pallet P-03133.  Then, you hit Select Location for the next prompt.

Finally, you scan/enter the location where you want his pallet moved.  We want it moved to Virginia Farm:

We then hit Confirm, and we’ve moved the contents of the pallet from one location to another.  I can then move another pallet, or access any other function within the Ascent Mobile Menu.

Let’s take a look at those serial#s and the pallet to see where they are now:

Move Location to Location is a new feature in the latest release.  It will allow you to have a From Location and a To Location and will move everything from one to the other.   That means, if you have several pallets at the From Location with many serial#s on them, it’ll move everything.  If you have a location with no serial#s but 20 or 30 items in it, you can move all 20 or 30 items all at once. No referencing items, pallets, lots, serial#s, anything except for the From Location and the TO Location.

First let’s look at all the serial#s for that item 409cm1.   We’re going to move everything from Ohio Farm to Virginia Farm.

Simply enter the From Location and the To Location and select Move Now:

When its finished, it’ll say this:

Of course, if you are using entities in Ascent, the From Location and the To Location MUST have the same entity.

Let’s take one last look at the serial#s:

There, that was easy!

Another thing to know is that when the material is moved from one location to the other (assuming the entities are the same), the moved material takes on all characteristics of that location, so if the From Location was counted in inventory and the TO Location is not counted in inventory, the moved material will be not counted in inventory.