Using default zones on workstations to control locations on POS sale shipments

Overview 

Workstations can have a default zone specified. The default zone can be used to make sale shipment lines entered from workstations in the POS area of the business put locations from the POS zone onto sale shipments. Preventing POS sale shipments from automatically selecting stock out of the warehouse.

Procedure

A retail area in the business which is/could have all it's location in a zone say "retail". All other workstations, other than POS workstations, would normally have the default zone remaining blank.

• Let's consider an example where some pos workstations exist and the default zone on those workstations is set to a zone named "POS". 
  • Some locations that have stock are in the "POS" zone 
  • When any sale shipments are typed in from a workstation where the "default zone" is specified, in this case "POS". Then only locations that are in the "POS" zone and which currently have stock will be considered to be placed on the sale shipment line.
  • If none of the locations in the "POS" zone have stock on hand when a product is entered on a new sale shipment line. Leave the location field on the sale shipment blank. Let the user manually select any pickable location. For example the user can pull down a list of all locations for the product from the sale shipment line. Then select a location in the warehouse if they really need the stock to be picked from there.
  •  When the user tries to complete the shipment, such as from a POS workstation, warn them about a location being empty if any of the sale shipment lines have an empty location.
•  Pos workstations, when creating sale shipments as for POS transactions, not sale orders. Can have a specific zone associated with the workstation. Then when sale shipment lines are entered, select a location from the specified zone if one exists and leaves the location on the sale shipment line empty if no locations in the specified zone.
•  Workstations other than the POS workstations are not expected to have a zone
•  This feature is not intended to effect sale orders. Sales for the warehouse are generally processed as sale orders.
•  The "pick" process applied to sale shipments is not changed. The pick process assigns stock locations to sale shipment lines when they are created from sale orders by automatic warehousing or when the pick button is pressed on sale shipments. The pick process tries to free up locations, make them empty so they can be reused in the warehouse, by always picking from the location with the least stock first. 
•  If you don't want the "pick" process to consider any of the locations in the "POS" zone, those locations should have a supply type of "Quarantine". Which will stop the pick process, used by the warehouse sale shipments, from picking stock in the "POS" zone.