The effective functioning of the service — especially for large companies — depends on proper inventory management. The larger company, the more inventory operations it performs. Use RemOnline bin locations to monitor and register a large amount of information. This feature allows you to clean up the inventory with any product amount (whether 100 product items or even 5000 ones). The bin locations help with organizing a convenient workflow and eliminating disorder.
Bin locations enable you to locate a product in a warehouse and assign an individual name (address) for each storage bin.
How to use the RemOnline bin locations?
There are several options for maintaining inventory with bin locations.
We recommend naming the warehouse according to the product group name If you have a fixed product range and the warehouse has enough bins for each product. This way, upon posting, you can put the product to the desired warehouse bin representing the actual shelf.
For example, there are “Cases” on the top shelf, there are “Cables” on the middle shelf, and there are “Chargers” on the lower shelf.
The same product may be in different bins. You can view product locations in the product dialog window in the “Shipments” and “Stock” tab.
For instance, most phone cases are in the warehouse, two in a basket (for quick sales), and one on the store window.
RemOnline will offer you to specify the product location upon adding products to the work order if there are multiple product items in the different warehouse bins.
This bin locations option is suitable for companies with a small product quantity and companies with a fixed product range, the ones wanting to put inventory in order and know the current product quantity and location. This may be inconvenient in case of a storage space shortage.
For example, in the “Cases” bin, there is insufficient space. At the same time, the “Cables” bin has a large amount of free space. To move some Cases, you will need to create a new bin and replace the bin barcodes.
Here’s what the companies that use a lot of shelves with a large product's quantities can do:
First things first, divide the storage into sections and then divide those sections into stands. Each stand consists of shelves. There can be multiple locations on the shelves — these will be your RemOnline bins. We recommend using alphanumeric bin naming.
For example, a stand consists of 6 shelves. Each shelf contains ten locations. This results in a total of 60 bins. You can number shelves with letters A-Z, and locations with numbers. Take into account the capacity. It means, if there are more than 100 locations on the shelf, you can start numbering with A001 if more than 1000 — with A0001. When you have many warehouses and many stands, you can alter letters and numbers values to create meaningful long names. For example, the location has a name С18Н036, meaning С is the number of the warehouse, 18 is the number of the stand, H is the number of the shelf, 036 is the number of the location. This way, it is easier for you to remember and understand the information.
As soon as you assign identifiers to your locations on the shelves, create the storage bins in RemOnline. Give each bin the name of the corresponding location on the shelf.
Let's consider a warehouse stand with six bins (3 shelves with two locations in each). The upper bins are A1 and A2, the middle ones are B1 and B2, the lower ones are C1, and C2. You need to create bins and print their barcodes in RemOnline, and then stick them on physical locations in the warehouse. For example, bin A1 stores chargers, cases are in bin A2, and cables are in bin B1.
Upon the simultaneous posting of all these products, enter the matching bin for each one. As a result, the warehouse employee will know where to put the products.
The alphanumeric naming of the bins has another advantage over the product group naming. It allows you to optimize the product distribution in your storage.
For example, you have an increased demand for cases, and you are starting to buy more. There will be insufficient space in bin A1, and you decide to transfer the some cases to bin C1. Select some of the products (cases) in bin A1 and transfer them to bin C1 to avoid replacing the bin barcodes.
To make it more convenient, you can change the default bin to the one you are transferring to on the “Settings > Warehouses” page. This way, you can omit to change every bin manually for each position.
By doing this, you quickly transfer the products in the system, according to their locations in the warehouse, and you do not need to print new bin barcodes and replace them. Besides, this way, you don’t confuse your employees with different names for the same bin.
Moreover, bin locations help reduce the impact of the human element. For instance, an employee puts several cases in the wrong bin. It means the system misses the products. During the stocktake, you will quickly identify the issue, since RemOnline enables you to perform a stocktake by bins.
Thanks to the bin locations, you can always find and take the products that you need in a matter of seconds. In case you are using the product dialog window and searching in the single warehouse, you can waste a significant time looking for a product in a single warehouse compared to finding the storage location of this product right away (A8C35 - warehouse A, stand 8, 3 on the top of the shelf, location 35). Moreover, you have the opportunity to use both options for organizing bin locations to address your preferences.
Not using bin locations in RemOnline, yet? Find instructions for activating this feature here.