WarehouseOS

Areas are a good way of physically separating locations. Areas have been used to designate locations that exist in separate physical buildings or to simply segment physical locations for separate purposes. 

An Inventory Allocation routine can ensure that an order is only allocated into its matching area. This helps ensure that an order is only fulfilled out of the locations designated for that purpose. But having this allocation routine turned on is not required to see a benefit with areas.

Even if not allocating by Area, adding Areas to a site has deeper implications on permissions and batching and those should be understood before adding Areas.

Implications of Areas

If Locations are assigned an Area, a User must be assigned to the same Area in order to perform any inventory transaction against those locations.

If an Area has been assigned to a User, only batches with matching Areas will be allowed to be downloaded and picked

When Batches are created, all of the orders within the batch must be in the same area. The batch adopts that area and the batch is assigned to the same area as the orders.

If orders don't have Areas, the batches won't have an Area assigned. Users won't be able to pick those batches because it doesn't fall under the permissions assigned by Area

Adding Areas

These are the steps to adding Areas to a site

1. Assign locations to an Area
   1. This is probably the main reason Areas are being added to the site. This is usually done as a CSV upload with changes to locations, but can also be done in bulk from within the Locations grid
   2. View the Location Actions section for editing locations Location Setup
2. Update the integration so that orders are assigned a "pickAreaName" when they are created
3. Update all open orders and set them to an Area
   1. This can be done in bulk from the Orders page
   2. Only orders that are not already batched can be updated in this way
   3. Review the Data Navigation principles and then go to Order => Orders to update all open orders

4. Update all open Batches and assign them to an Area in the batch header

   1. This has to be done one by one, opening each batch to add the area

5. Update all orders on open batches and assign them to an Area

   1. This has to be done one by one because an order is locked once it is batched and the bulk edit features in the Orders grid don't apply the changes

6. (An Alternative to 4 and 5 above) Undo all of the open batches, edit the orders in bulk to assign the area, then recreate the batches now that the batch will get the area from the orders

7. Assign Users to the appropriate Areas

   1. View the User Actions section for assigning users in bulk WOS Operations Users

Adding Locations to an Area

Area assigmnets can be managed from the Locations grid. The column Area will identify the Area the Location has been assigned to. Actions below the grid can be used to update and manage the Area assignment.

1. Go to Maint -> Locations
2. Filter the grid to the desired locations
3. In the Actions menu below the grid, select Set Area
4. Select an Area from the options
5. Click Save Filtered
   1. Alternatively, only select a portion of the filtered Locations and select Save Selected

Managing Area Locations

Follow the instructions from the Adding Locations to an Area section. The Actions menu below the Locations grid can be used to set or clear an Area from the selected Locations.