scanforce – Schulz Consulting

Enhance Your Sage 100 Warehouse Processing With ScanForce WMS

January 26, 2022 by Wayne Schulz

ScanForce provided the following February 2022 update about their Sage 100 Warehouse Management solution. This includes new products as well as demonstrations and webinars. Many of these webinars are recorded and will be provided to you after the meeting is held.

Customers who use ScanForce typically are also using mobile bar code scanners so their warehouse employees can pick, pack and ship while completely untethered from a computer.

ScanForce also offers a multi-bin option to allow for inventory items to be assigned into more than one bin. This enhancement also allows for restrictions by bin which can be useful for inspections or allocating of inventory to a specific use such as customer or manufacturing.

Sage 100 Webinar: The 2022 Warehouse: Doing More with Less

Every day we talk to businesses who are struggling to retain sufficient staffing for their warehouse operations. With no end in sight to the current labor shortages, businesses need to find ways to work smarter, not harder, in the warehouse. Join us to learn about tools and workflows for Sage 100 users that can facilitate the movement and tracking of inventory through barcode scanning technology, reducing the need for human intervention and keeping your inventory flowing.

We’ll cover:

Hidden ways that being short-staffed hinders growth
The basics of Warehouse Management Systems (WMS)
How using a WMS fast tracks employee onboarding
New workflow automation tools such as Pallet Tracking, Make To Order, and our new enhanced Sales Order Wave Pick/Ship

Tue, Feb 1, 2022 1:00 PM – 1:30 PM EST – Register Here

ScanForce Feature/Product Release Schedule – 2022

Make to Order – create a Production Mgmt Work Ticket directly from a Sales Order – released Q2 2021
Contact ScanForce for more information or to schedule a demo.

Labor Mgmt Console – view and edit Production Mgmt Labor transactions before committing to Sage 100 – released Q2 2021. Read more about Manufacturing Labor Tracking

Enhanced Sales Order Wave Pick/Ship Selection – added to our ScanForce Management Console, sales orders can be selected to be added to a wave of orders to be efficiently picked or shipped together. Orders can be individually selected or bulk selected based on filtering by certain fields. – Released Q3 2021

Support for Sage 2022 – within days of Sage’s release, expected sometime in March.

Container Receipt Management Enhancement for Sage 100

Use Container Receipt Management when you need to receive a shipment on the books for accounting purposes, but the items haven’t been physically received yet and are therefore not available for sale. For example, when a shipment is in transit, perhaps stuck on the water, and you’ve taken ownership of the items, but they haven’t been physically received.

Recent Case Study – All Seasonings Ingredients Achieves Growth After Transitioning to ScanForce

All Seasonings operates three warehouses, including a multiline production facility, and uses Sage to manage its operations. Several years ago, the business determined that directed picking, putaway, replenish, label printing, and license plating would streamline processes and increase efficiency.

The company integrated software with Sage to enable these functions. Unfortunately, however, the solution contained bugs that developers couldn’t resolve, even though the provider promised it would work “right out of the box.” In addition, because All Seasonings does not have an internal IT department, each issue resulted in tens of thousands of dollars in fees from their IT service provider or Sage consultant.

Other ScanForce Enhancements To Streamline Warehouse Processing

ScanForce offers numerous enhancements for Sage 100 / Sage 100cloud. Below are a few which fully integrate with their Warehouse Management offering.

Alias Unit of Measure – This Enhancement allows you to specify a unit of measure and a multiplier tying both to the first General Alias number in Item Maintenance. For example: Item ABC has an Alias Item Number of 123. The Unit of Measure may be CASE and the multiplier would be 24. Each time the user scans the Alias “123” ScanForce will automatically calculate that scan to equal 24 eaches.

Auto-Post – ScanForce AutoPost automatically updates, or posts, Purchase Order Receipt of Goods, Inventory Transactions, Bill of Material Production Entry, and Product Management transactions. This feature allows a real-time view of inventory levels. Know exactly what items you have available to sell and ship while eliminating the need to manually update these transactions back in Sage 100.

Dashboards – View realtime data related to Sales Order Status: Ready to Pick, Being Picked, Ready to Pack, and Shipped. Customize the data and view to suit your needs.

Container Receipt Management – Items arriving from overseas may take days or longer to arrive on the receiving dock. However, in many situations, you own the items the moment they leave the dock to being their journey to your location. It is important to account for these items in your inventory system, but not show them as available for sale. Utilizing the benefits within your Sage system provided by the use of Warehouse Codes and Bin Locations (requires the Sage selected DSD / ScanForce MultiBin Solution), ScanForce allows you to create a Purchase Order Receipt of Goods in Sage and ‘receive’ the items into a Warehouse or Bin designated for overseas items. ScanForce then allows you to validate the items and quantities based on the data on the initial Purchase Order. The items are automatically transferred from the Overseas Warehouse or Bin to the main locations in the warehouse.

Wave Receiving – This enhancement allows the grouping of Purchase Orders together giving the benefit of going item by item to record a receipt of more than one Purchase Order at a time.

Directed Picking – This feature is available in SF WMS Advanced and SF WMS Premium. Go paperless with SF Directed Picking. The mobile device displays items and locations to pick. The locations are sorted on the handheld affording the user the luxury of walking the warehouse one time to pick an order. More than one bin location may be used when DSD / ScanForce MultiBin is installed.

Pick to Pallet – Pick to Pallet offers a streamlined method to stage orders by pallet and then quickly, accurately, and efficiently ship the pallets.

Sales Order Picking – Sage does not allow for a status of an order to show as ‘picked’, but not invoiced. ScanForce provides this feature with SF SO Picking. This is available in SF WMS Advanced and SF WMS Premium. SF WMS Premium moves items out of the initial bin into a ‘staging’ bin location. The program writes back to SO Entry to change the allocated bin to the ‘staging’ bin.

Split Picking – Divide large Sales Orders into more than one picking sheet. Split the order by the number of lines, product line, or any of the category fields to allow more than one user to pick an order at the same time without the confusion of who is set to pick each line.

Wave Picking / Wave Shipping – Group Sales Orders together to pick (or ship) more than one at a time. There are two ways to create a wave – Sales Orders are selected on the mobile device and are “waved” or grouped together within the ScanForce mobile program. You can also create a wave within ScanForce’s Management Console using sophisticated selection criteria. Using SF Directed Picking the user is directed where to go in the warehouse and what to get. Items are automatically sorted by location.

Signature Capture at SO Shipping – This enhancement allows the capture of a signature in ScanForce Sales Order Shipping. The signature is saved as a file that is linked to the order history (invoice history) in Sage. The file can be tied to a printing form to allow the signature to display when the invoice is printed.

Make to Order – Production Management – Upon entering a Make to Order enabled item to a Sales Order, ScanForce’s Make to Order Automation enhancement allows you to create a Production Management Work Ticket directly from Sales Order Entry. ( Sage 100 2020+ )

Multi-Bin – Add the ability to capture WMS transactions including Multi-Bin locations with the handheld.

Pallet / License Plate Tracking – Adds the ability to track a unique ID for a group of items, typically a pallet. Receive, transfer and sell complete pallets.

Auto-Allocate by Case Pack – A new setting within Multi-Bin will allow to auto-allocate by Case Pack. When enabled, if the ordered quantity is greater than or equal to a Case Pack, it will direct the user to the Location Type that stores full cases of product (overstock). If the quantity ordered is less than a full case, then it will direct the user to the normal picking area first, and only to the full case locations if there is nothing else available.

SO Shipping / Delivery Signature Capture – Provides the ability to load orders onto a mobile device to validate remote delivery. Captures the customers’ signature approving the delivery. Data and signature import back to Sage 100 to create invoice. Signature can be added to printed docs and reports.

Sage 100 Directed Picking for your Warehouse

June 4, 2020 by Darcy Boerio

Is your warehouse staff wasting time wandering the aisles of your warehouse picking items haphazardly? Could you increase productivity and speed up fulfillment if orders were picked in a more deliberate manner?

One solution to this is ScanForce Directed Picking for Sage 100, which is available for users of ScanForce WMS Advanced and Premium.

The concept of Directed Picking is to tell a user on their mobile device where to go within the warehouse to pick the goods and what to get. The device guides the user through the most efficient path based on item locations.

In this recording from ScanForce, join Steve Showalter as he walks you through the process.

This feature works with and without multi-bin. In the demo shown, Steve is referencing a bin location, so in a non multi-bin install this is going to look to the standard bin locations that are set up in Sage 100 inventory item maintenance.

How it works

This demonstration uses the DSD/ScanForce Multi-Bin which leverages the allocation methods back in the multi-bin solution, so it assigns a bin location based on a certain set of rules available within multi-bin.

This allocation can occur automatically at several points. It can also be done manually back at the order level, so what you’ll see is simply an emulation of the mobile screen as is available on iOS and Android devices.

For this video, you’ll see the picking transaction, however the Directed Picking side carries through to the one-step Sage 100 Sales Order shipping if you’re not doing a staging of a Sales Order.

When the user launches Sage 100 Sales Order Picking on the mobile device, ScanForce will prompt for the Sage 100 Sales Order number. From here, the user can scan the order from a picking sheet, key it in, or do a lookup that connects in real-time to the Sage 100 accounting system displaying all available orders.

When the order has been selected, the device will connect up real-time and grab the information from Sage 100, placing it locally on the device. The user can then go stage this order with Multi-Bin by indicating a bin location. Sage can be set to default to a shipping bin, a staging bin, or any bin you’d like.

ScanForce Directed Picking takes over, and the display shows the user where to go and what to get – sorted by bin location as well.

Even though an item may be the first line on the sales order, ScanForce Directed Picking will direct the user to go to a different bin first to get a closer item because it’s sorting by bin locations. This means they’re not going all over the warehouse back and forth again, it’s a Directed Pick.

This also works with lot and serialized inventory type items. ScanForce Directed Picking will direct the user where to get these lot/serial numbers.

The ScanForce Directed Picking concept is to tell the person where to go using the most efficient route possible so they can quickly and easily pick or ship that Sage Sales Order.

How To Handle Warehouse Transfers in Sage 100cloud

March 6, 2020 by Wayne Schulz

Working in a storage. Placing cardboard boxes on a pile. Man with a white hard hat holding a carton box in a warehouse.

A question was raised recently by one of our Sage 100cloud distribution customers. They planned to open a new warehouse in another state and need a way to transfer inventory between the warehouses while still maintaining the visibility of on-hand available quantities.

Since this particular customer is not yet integrated with warehouse management software we will first investigate a series of manual processes using Sage 100cloud inventory transaction entry.

To start we plan to add at least two user-defined fields. The first, Tracking #, will allow inventory staff to monitor the progress of the shipment.

The second field, Final WHSE, will allow us to automate the transfer once it has been received at the final warehouse. For large orders, we don’t want staff manually entering another transaction so we plan to export out the original transaction entry and use the Final WHSE UDF to create another entry using Sage 100cloud Visual Integrator.

We expect that this use of Custom Office plus Visual Integrator may allow us to temporarily avoid a more custom solution until the volume grows to the point where this manual process is no longer feasible.

Once we outgrow the manual process we expect to implement a more automated system such as one that ScanForce offers.

ScanForce Warehouse Management To Automate Transfers

In anticipation of eventually needing to further automate this transfer task, I asked ScanForce who produces a popular line of WMS ( Warehouse Management Solutions ) for Sage 100 which makes use of both wired and wireless bar code scanners to highly automate these types of processes.

Transfer Request From Sales Order – ScanForce Lite

Create Sales Order in Sage for the items requesting to be transferred (create a customer like INTERNAL TRANSFER to distinguish this as a transfer from real sales orders)
The ScanForce mobile program will prompt the user for the “FROM” and “TO” warehouses
User will enter the sales order number of the transfer request. The program will do a live lookup to pull the items and quantities on the order.
User scans/enters items as they are being picked. The entry is validated to ensure the item is on the order.
User enters the quantity. The entry is validated to ensure it is not greater than what is on the order.
Upon data transfer from the scanner to Sage, a Transfer transaction is created moving the items and quantities from one warehouse to the other.
The transfer sales order must be manually managed/deleted in Sage upon completion of the transfer.

To use a Quote instead of a Sales Order – 3 custom programming hours

Transfer Request From Sales Order – ScanForce Plus

Same concepts as Lite with the following variations:

Checkbox is added to Sales Order Entry in Sage to indicate the order is for a Transfer request
The ScanForce mobile program will have an option to only display during the Pick process orders that have the Transfer request Checkbox checked for more efficient processing.
The “TO” warehouse code is indicated upon entry of the Sales Order in Sage.
The “FROM” warehouse is pulled from the line items on the order. This eliminates the need for the scanner user to select the TO and FROM warehouses.
The mobile program will compare the picked quantity with the order quantity to determine if the transfer has been completed. If so, a COMPLETE status will be set for the order.
OPTION – Orders that are COMPLETE will be automatically deleted in Sage upon data transfer from the scanner. This eliminates the need to manually delete the order in Sage.
If this auto-delete option is disabled, the Sage user will be warned if they try to delete an incomplete order.
If using our Advanced or Premium version, bin locations will be displayed to provide a Directed Pick making the pick process more efficient.
To use a Quote instead of a Sales Order –5 custom programming hours

There are probably another half-dozen variations on this workflow that could be implemented depending upon the complexity of your inventory transfer requirements.

This type of transfer is typically not needed if you are using virtual warehouses within the same building or in a location where you can easily carry inventory from one warehouse to another.

If you have questions on how Sage 100cloud might be better tailored to handle your company’s requirements please contact us here.

ScanForce Announces Production Management Automation

January 22, 2020 by Darcy Boerio

The release of Sage Production Management made big headlines in the Sage 100 community in 2019. Replacing several legacy applications – Work Order and MRP – the new module is written in the “framework” essentially meaning that it has more modern technology that is consistent with much of the rest of Sage 100cloud.

Here’s a helpful reference for more about Production Management itself:

Sage 100 Work Order vs Production Management

Manufacturing is a big vertical for Sage 100, with many Sage 100 partners reporting an uptick in adoption of Sage 100 as a whole by manufacturers in 2019. For new Sage 100cloud adopters, this is a no-brainer. They won’t have an option to use the legacy WO and MRP.

But for existing Sage 100cloud customers, they need to decide when the time is right for them to switch over (they’ll all have to make the move eventually). Adoption by this group has been slow by all accounts, which is not uncommon when people are being asked to leave what they know for something new that hasn’t been on the market long enough to garner proven success. Naturally people want others to be the “guinea pigs” and identify holes in the solution that the publisher can repair before they jump into the fray.

One such hole was the lack of an integration to ScanForce’s mobile barcode scanning technology. Users of Work Order and MRP were previously able to use mobile barcode scanning devices by ScanForce to automate actions like capturing material issues and completions as well as Labor Tracking. Only after the release was ScanForce able to access the functionality in order to develop their integration to Production Management.

Another problem that needed to be resolved after the initial release was that it didn’t initially integrate with DSD/ScanForce Multi-Bin, which is included out-of-the box for free with every license of Sage 100cloud. So if you were using the free multi-bin tool that comes with Sage and you wanted to move to Production Management, you would need to adopt a different multi-bin tool or forego multi-bin functionality in the PM process.

Fortunately, both of these issues have been resolved! In December, 2019, ScanForce announced compatibility between Production Management and DSD/ScanForce Multi-Bin. And today they’ve announced the February 1 general availability of the integration of their barcode scanning technology with Production Management.

You can read more about the solution on the ScanForce blog and/or join them for a live webinar:

Keep an eye on Wayne’s blog as things develop – you know he’ll give you the scoop!

Warehouse Wizard Series Parts 4 – 6

July 9, 2019 by Darcy Boerio

Last month we brought you parts 1 – 3 of the six-part “Warehouse Wizard Series”, a joint effort by ScanForce and Sage Inventory Advisor to provide educational content for Sage 100 users who operate warehouses.

Read Parts 1 – 3 of the Warehouse Wizard Series

And now for parts 4 – 6:

Part 4: Incorrect Levels Drive Excess Inventory

While having excess inventory on hand can seem like a safe bet to make sure you can meet demand, it is not cost-effective and can stunt your business’ growth.

On the other hand, you can have the best methodology imaginable in place to optimize replenishment and avoid excess inventory, but if your inputs are wrong, you will still fail. Good decisions start with accurate data.

Read Reducing Excess Inventory to learn about how to address the complexities associated with not having a source of truth for your levels.

Part 5: The Advantages of ABC Analysis

Ranking your items lets you focus on the ones that really matter. Whether they’re high velocity/high value or slow moving/low value or anywhere in between, these criteria can help you make better decisions about where to focus your time and working capital.

Read up on The 5 Advantages of an Effective ABC Analysis to learn how these classifications can lead to increased profits.

Part 6: Free Tools for Sage 100cloud to Optimize Inventory

Your Sage 100cloud subscription comes with a number of free tools that were previously only available for purchase. Two of these products that are included “out of the box” are:

DSD/ScanForce Multi-Bin Basic by ScanForce
Sage Inventory Advisor Basics by Sage Inventory Advisor

Are you taking advantage of these features you already own? The infographic shows some of the functionality available to help you optimize inventory without purchasing any additional software.

That’s it for the series. Thanks for reading along! You’re a Warehouse Wizard!

Contact ScanForce or Sage Inventory Advisor if we can be of assistance with any of the initiatives you learned about in the series.