Creating and Managing Locations with Dynamic Slotting

Managing your inventory is crucial to having a seamless warehouse experience for the warehouse team and reducing cost/loss. With dynamic slotting, ShipHero makes managing inventory easy and flexible for different business needs. Locations are required to move inventory around and make it easy for the team to find specific products. In this article, we cover: 

Location Settings
How to Create a Single Location
How to Create Multiple Locations via CSV

Check out our article about Optimizing Your Warehouse Layout with a Naming Scheme for recommendations.

Location Settings

With dynamic slotting, various options are available to manipulate inventory and make it available to picking teams and customers. Below are the different properties that can be assigned to locations:

Location Types
Pickable Vs. Non-Pickable
Sellable Vs. Non-Sellable
Transfer Bin
Bin Priority

Location Types

Location types are categories of the different locations in the warehouse, i.e., bins or pallets, small or large. Use location types to describe how inventory is stored, i.e., upper rack or floor-loaded. This helps identify tools needed to access/move inventory, such as a forklift or pallet jack. Using location types makes billing storage much more manageable for 3PLs, depending on their pricing model. 

Check out the following article for more information on creating location types.

Pickable Vs. Non-Pickable

Manage which locations are accessible to your teams during the fulfillment process and manage replenishment needs using the pickable and non-pickable location settings. All items on an order must be in a pickable location for the order to have a "Ready to Pick" status and show in the mobile applications; other workflows, such as Bulk Ship and Wholesale orders, will allow a non-pickable location to be selected during the fulfillment process. 

• Pickable locations are available to pickers via the mobile app during order fulfillment. 
• Non-Pickable locations are omitted from the picker's queue via the mobile app. Non-pickable locations are most commonly used for overstock or pallet locations that are separated from the main picking zones.  

Sellable Vs. Non-Sellable

Manage the available inventory pushed to a sales channel using sellable and non-sellable location settings.

• Inventory assigned to  Sellable locations is included in the total on-hand quantity and used to calculate the available quantity pushed to store platforms. Sellable locations can be Pickable or Non-Pickable.
• Inventory assigned to Non-Sellable locations is not included in the on-hand inventory when calculating the available amount pushed to store platforms. Non-Sellable locations are non-pickable by nature and often used for staging locations such as returns, receiving areas, damages, or reserved quantities. 

Transfer Bin

Enable the Transfer Bin setting for locations used for moving inventory around the warehouse. Transfer bins are often used to replenish pickable locations from non-pickable locations. This will help track a good's physical movements throughout the warehouse. 

Bin Priority

By default, ShipHero's mobile application sends pickers to the location with the least amount of inventory available to complete an order. To control which pickable locations pickers are sent to over others, use Bin Priority. Priority is determined using an incremental scale. 0 has a higher priority than 1, 2 more than 3, and so on.

How to Create a Single Location 

Create locations one by one on the Inventory > Locations page. 

1. Go to app.shiphero.com > Inventory > Locations and select the  Add Locations button.
2. Fill in the Location Name, and check the boxes next to the needed settings.

   Note: For pickable locations, check the box for sellable first and then check the box for pickable.

3. Select a Location Type; this is not required but is highly recommended. 
4. If multi-warehouse is enabled, select the Warehouse where the location is being created. 
   
5. Hit Save.

Note: If the Location Name is the only information entered, then the location will be created on the Primary warehouse, pick priority 1, non-pickable, and non-sellable.

How to Create Multiple Locations via CSV 

Creating many bin locations can be time-consuming if done one at a time. Fortunately, creating multiple bin locations with a simple CSV upload is possible.

1. Go to app.shiphero.com > My Account > CSV Management.
2. Click the Select Item to Update dropdown and select Locations.
3. Click Download Locations Template.
4. Add the locations to the template and save.

   Note: The template is case-sensitive; make sure to use "Yes" or "No" when updating each location as non/pickable or non/sellable.

5. If multi-warehouse is enabled, select the warehouse from the dropdown in which the locations are added.
6. Upload the file. 

Note: Location Type and the Transfer Bin settings are not available on the CSV template to upload locations. These will need to be added manually after the initial creation of the locations.