Sometimes warehouse workers find themselves in a situation, where they have a small quantity of an item that they want to consolidate with a larger quantity on another location. It could be item samples in a quality area or leftover raw materials in the production area, that needs to be returned to a bulk area – preferably to a location where the item is already located. It could also just be misplaced items in the warehouse that you’d want to move to their correct location.

In these situations the worker would need help to move the leftover items to a location where the item is already stored.

Using the mobile device to find the existing quantity

Fortunately AX has a nice function that will help the worker with just that. Before I get into the details with the setup, I will show you the process first. Note that the example below is from the new Dynamics AX, but the setup and process is the same in AX 2012 R3 (from CU9 and up I believe).

So in my example we have a leftover of 22 pieces of item BILAR002 on location BULK-090. The warehouse worker wants to consolidate this leftover with an existing pallet if possible. From the on-hand form you’ll see that a pallet exists at location BULK-021 – but the warehouse worker has no knowledge of that.

01-onhand-before

The warehouse worker activates a new Consolidate function on the mobile device:

02-consolidate-menuitem

First he scans the leftover license plate:

03-movement-by-template

The mobile device will  now present a somewhat redundant pick window – that you’ll just press OK to.

04-movement-by-template

The mobile device now proposes to put the items on location BULK-021, because  item BILAR002 is already on stock on that location:

05-movement-by-template

If you just press OK in form above, then the LP-LEFTOVER license plate will be moved to location BULK-021. In that case, the end result would be that location BULK-021 would contain two license plates: LP-LEFTOVER with a quantity of 22 and LPBILAR002 with a quantity of 99,955. You can however consolidate the two license plates too by pressing Override LP:

06-movement-by-template

And now the end result is that item BILAR002 is consolidated at both location level and License plate level on location BULK-021:

07-onhand-after

The consolidate strategy is your friend

The function used to perform the Consolidation above is the Movement by template function, combined with a location directive setup with a Consolidate strategy.

Here’s the location directive with the consolidate strategy:

08-location-directive

09-query

You also need a work template:

10-work-templates

And finally the consolidate menu item setup as Movement by template:

11-menu-item

If you’re working with batch controlled items you typically want to consolidate at the batch level also. Meaning you want the system to propose the location where a pallet is stored with the same item AND batch id. The consolidate directive does not support that. It should however be a fairly simple task to extend it to the batch level. You are welcome to contact me if you want help with that.

You can find more information on Movement by template in these links:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dynamicsaxscm/2016/01/14/inventory-on-hand-movementstransfers-using-the-mobile-device-menus/

https://organicax.com/2016/05/11/wms-menu-movement-by-template/