Is there a way to transfer entire contents of a one warehouse to another?

During the course of a 2 week period, I build a load of material that is transferred from our main warehouse to a satellite warehouse location. This process happens every 2 weeks.

We back an empty trailer up to the dock and load it a little every day using the material transfer method. at the end of the 2 weeks the entire load then needs to be transferred again from the trailer location into the satellite warehouse. Currently this process requires us to manually re-create a new material transfer from all of the individual daily transfers we made into the trailer. This process is very much open to human data entry error. The list usually contains over 4000 different item codes. That is a lot of opportunity for error.

Once we have everything loaded into the trailer location, it sure would be nice to have a single action that would transfer all of that into the satellite warehouse without having to manually create another single long material transfer form (over 4000 lines).

Is this possible in the current system? (I am on v10)

Thanks,

BKM

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In Stock Reconciliation there is an option to select all items available in a particular warehouse, you can try the same method in the stock transfer as well.
If it is not working make a future request in GitHub.

How do you enter 4000 items to trailer location?

We ave 5 or 6 “picker-packers” working in the main warehouse at any given time. There are 2 assigned full time to building the satellite warehouse load. When the others are not picking for customer orders, they assist the 2 full time warehouse pickers. They each have a cart with an attached laptop and barcode scanner (or a tablet and scanner) that they use to pack boxes and bins to load into the trailer (using material transfer under “Stock”).

When a box or bin is full, the stock transfer report is printed. A copy goes inside the box and another on the outside of the box. The box is then loaded to a pallet. when the pallet is full it is moved onto the empty trailer. Between the pickers, they try to get about 700 item codes packed and loaded each day. When the load is completed, copies of all the smaller transfer reports are given to the inventory manager and he must then create the big transfer from the trailer location to the satellite warehouse location.

Every 2 weeks a truck picks up the freshly loaded trailer from the main warehouse and takes it to the satellite warehouse. The truck swaps the new loaded trailer for the empty left there from the last visit and then returns the empty to the loading dock at the main warehouse so the whole cycle can begin again.

Still looking for a better way to manage this process. A command to simply move everything from one warehouse to another in a single command would be the ideal solution. I had hoped that something like this already existed.

In our case, the main warehouse is also the manufacturing facility. Over half of the item codes we user are for items we manufacture. This means we cannot simply have a vendor deliver to multiple warehouses since we are the vendor in most cases.

How do other users manage multiple warehouses?

What am I missing here that could simplify this process?

BKM

In stock transfers, there is no option to select all items from a warehouse. There is only selecting items from a purchase order, BOM, product bundle, or sales order.

Stock reconciliation is not the way to do this function. It should be reserved for fixing data errors in the inventory counts.

In a ERP system of this magnitude, I find it hard to believe this was never built in at the beginning.

BKM

I mean that you can write your own method/function in the same way in the stock transfer.

ERPNext is still in the growing stage so that we can support and contribute to the same to build a better Open source ERP product in the market.

Try to use duplicate option for entered MR by pick packers and changed the stock location from trailer to to Satellite warehouse or you can download MR stock details to CSV file then upload in to new MR which is entered by item manager.

Is this working??

No. Not working. The problem is that there are daily Material Transfers into the trailer “warehouse” meaning that there are many transfer documents over the course of the 2 weeks. Sometimes there are multiple new transfer documents in a single day to the trailer location.

In order to use your idea, I would need to make sure I create just as many “duplicate” transfers and then try to change the warehouse for each of them to get it correct. I did not even try to go down that road.

You see, sometimes we over estimate our abilities and pack too much of some products onto the trailer and then have to generate another material transfer to pull some of it back off. Some now there are transfers that go both ways that need to be tracked and sorted before a plan like you proposed could work. We are a manufacturer as well as distributor of our own items. If we produce a batch of product and assign it all to the trailer packing for the satellite warehouse, there are times when the next batch of production meant for the main warehouse fails QC testing and must be scrapped. When this happens, we sometimes have to pull some product back from the trailer before it ships in order to keep all warehouses stocked with product.

When there are so many transactions related to packing the trailer, it becomes almost as cumbersome to try your proposal as it is to build the whole thing by hand again.

It is for this reason that it makes sense to have a simple, single transaction that can transfer the entire contents of a of one warehouse location to another.

I know I am not alone in this kind using this kind of process. I meet regularly with my local chamber of commerce, and when we talk shop, I learn about their processes for doing these kind of simple transactions. I am definitely at a disadvantage right now with ERPNext.

BKM

I have not been able to find a way to upload a CSV file for a material transfer. If that were possible it might make something like this workable.

BKM

We have option to upload csv for MR

Did you find any solution for this, @bkm?

I used to work on much much bigger ERP system like IFS Applications and Dynamics AX, but even they don’t have this kind of ability.

@CostaRica @AbdalAliy

When I was just an systems guy at a facility using SAP, I had a simple script with a shortcut in my account that I could do this very thing. It saved me countless hours of extra work.

Currently I have 2 clients that would like to have something like this. I tried to find something that I could use in the system to do it, but nothing available.

The client that complains the loudest would only use it 2 times a year when they do their physical inventories.

They keep 6 box trucks running around in about a 300 mile radius to their multitude of commercial customers and sell directly out of the truck at wholesale to them. They treat the trucks as individual warehouses. The trucks are as organized as possible but still difficult to find things in them when it comes time for the counting.

The physical inventory counting concept for the trucks was to back one up to the loading dock and unload the truck completely onto the dock. As the items come off and piled up they would be scanned into a temporary (imaginary) warehouse that was really the pile on the dock floor. Once everything was scanned out of the truck, the sales rep driver would just have to load the truck backup from the dock in any manner that he wants to make it easy for him to find stuff in his truck. Then he is off the dock in the fastest possible time and back to selling.

In the mean time, reports are generated from the temporary warehouse to accurately reflect the inventory of the truck warehouse. When the reports are done and csv files downloaded, then a single function or click button should transfer the entire contents of the imaginary temporary warehouse back to the truck before it gets to its first commercial customer to sell that day.

This would speed up the physical counting process and limit the impact on the sales bottom line. The single function transfer could easily be limited to Stock Manager role only.

There is also another possible use for this…
There is another client that has multiple brick and mortar stores and a central main warehouse (which is also their manufacturing facility). They have three empty trailers backed up to their dock at all times. During the course of the week (as they manufacture and bundle products) the also pack each trailer that would be sent to each of the 3 stores over the weekend to replenish their inventories.

In this case the ability to transfer items to a trailer warehouse during the week and then transfer the entire trailer contents to the store warehouse with a single function would be a time saver.

Anyway… Up to this point, there is no easy solution.
There was another person here on the forum that is a developer and he offered to make me a custom application to perform this in v10 and then generate the PR to get the function built into the v12 that is currently developing.

If you are interested in something like this, PM me and I will send you his contact information. The price was reasonable, and it would be nice to have it in the coming v12 as standard.

Both of my clients started their new fiscal years last month and their accountants are flat refusing to authorize any more expenditures on ERP software until after the midpoint of the year. So I am not in a position to get this done for a while.

BKM

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