Article Management
- Bart Friederichs
Analytics
Introduction
One of the most important and most used parts of the system, is article management. In StockControl, an “article” is a stock-keeping unit (SKU), or product. Articles must exist in the system, before anything useful can be done with it. Articles can come in different sizes and shapes and StockControl uses the Client to manage all this diversity.
Note the difference between “articles” and “items”. An “article” is an object that holds all properties of what can be processed in the system. An “item” is an actual physical object in the warehouse.
E.g. when you have 5 DVD players, and 2 LED TVs on stock, you have 2 “articles”, but 7 “items”.
Basic Article Management
Using the Client, you can open the article management by choosing Management → Articles:
This opens a window, with a list of all available articles:
Under the right-mouse-button menu, you will find Add, Edit, Delete. Using the Delete option, you can recursively delete the article. This will then also remove stock, orders and history of that article.
Using a double-click, you can open the Article Editor:
In its most basic form, an article is a Customer Unit, or CU. This is a smallest unit the system can work with, and ERP communication, stock levels and new orders all work with CUs. StockControl has support for packs.
In the Article Editor screen, you can provide the following information:
Article #: This is the article number as used by the end user of the system. StockControl has its own unique identifier (
articleid) internally.EAN: This is a comma separated list of barcodes (the name EAN is a little misleading, other codes are allowed too) for this article.
Description: Article description, used in communication with the operator or order picker.
Dimensions and Weight: Dimensions are in millimeters, weight in grams. Absolute maximum is 1 000 000 mm.
Multiplier: The amount of items in this pack. For a CU this is fixed 1 (one). See Packs for more information on this.
Replenish Min / Replenish Max / Replenish Min Large / Replenish Max Large: The replenish levels for
pickandpicklargezones. Replenish is done as follows: when the level goes under “Min”, it will replenish until “Max”.Categories: Comma separated list of categories. See also Categories .
Pick Logic: How the articles should flow through the warehouse. First In First Out (FIFO) or Last In First Out (LIFO).
Packs
StockControl supports the usage of what is called “packs”. A pack is fixed collection of items of a certain article, for example a box or a pallet. Packs can be created through the Article Editor, by using the right-mouse-button menu on the Packs list:
When adding a pack, a new pack will be created from the pack (or CU) that was selected. The newly created pack will have a multiplier of 10 × the pack it derives from, and will update the description accordingly. You can build a complete tree of packs in such a way:
As you can see here, is that you can change the Multiplier.
Host Connector
The standard host connector supports the download and creation of articles.