How to effectively manage your Inventory Routes in Odoo?

Routes are an essential part, which is vital for our Inventory management process, as they are used to control product manufacturing chains, product default location, or to help in rental management by generating automated product moves. This helps us to streamline the processes, and save time. With routes, we can also add steps like quality control after sales services or supplier returns which will help us to keep a track of our product’s quality at each stage of their life cycle. There are many different ways to use and apply routes.

Now, let us make sure that we have set up the multi-step routes configuration. To do so, let us go to the Inventory module, then click on the Configuration sub menu and click Settings. At the Settings page, scroll down a little bit nearly to the bottom and then you will find the Multi-step Routes check box, under Warehouse section which should be set enabled by clicking on the check box before moving on to the next step as shown in the screenshot below.

Let us now go ahead and go to the Configuration menu and click on the Warehouses sub-menu. You will see that you have one warehouse shown at the moment. And ofcourse you are able to create more than one warehouse by clicking on the Create button which will therefore shows more warehouses here, as shown below in the screenshot.

Moving on, let’s click on the warehouse given, and then click on the Edit button on the top left-hand side of the screen. Here you can change your warehouse name if required and then you are able to actually decide how we would like to receive and deliver goods for this specific warehouse. So you can do that in multiple steps if you would like to. For example, I can receive the goods in input and then add them to your stock, or you can receive the goods in input, check the quality and then add to my stock, as shown in the screenshot below.

This depends on your business needs to simply receive, and deliver. If you want to deliver goods in one step, you could still receive goods in three steps, which again depends on the nature of your business.

Let us now click the Save button, and we are actually going to check out the routes we have for this warehouse. To do so, click on the Routes smart button which is at the top right-hand side of your screen, as shown in the screenshot above.

Now if you have multiple warehouses, and have some routes that are specific to that warehouse, you will see the warehouse name before the route at the left-hand side, and also be able to see the company name against each route, if you are in a multi company environment. Let us now look at one route which can be chosen to open, then click on the Edit button. Select the company name on the dropdown field if you need to, and have a name of the route, and can also say what it is applicable on so you are able to have a couple of choices, where you can choose product categories, product warehouses, or even sales order lines. Below you are able to add rules, as shown in the screenshot below.

Now click on the rule below named “Buy” to open, as shown in the screenshot which comes under Rules, then appears a box to perform warehouse actions. We now have the action and we are going to pull from our source locations of warehouse stock, and we have our operation type, and the destination location, which will be our partner or customer location, and then we have our supply method as you are able to choose Take from stock, Trigger another rule, or in this case we can say take from stock if unavailable, trigger another rule.

Therefore, we would like the system to trigger the routes which will automatically generate an RFQ. Now let’s move on and click the Save button to proceed further.

We now go to the Sales module, and create a new quotation, then add the sale order line to sell a product to a customer and we will Save it and click to Confirm. On the product configuration, you have the buy routes selected. When you confirm the sales order, a couple of things will be happening, as firstly the delivery order will be generated automatically. So let us go ahead and click on the Delivery smart button which is at the top right-hand side of the screen, as shown in the screenshot below.

You will then see that we are waiting on another operation. So the system looked at the quantity that we had on hand for that product which was zero so triggered the buy route and that generated an RFQ automatically where we were waiting to receive that item.

To know more about the functionalities for an effective Inventory management route in Odoo, please feel free to have a detailed discussion with Zestybeanz Tech to implement this solution seamlessly.