I organized our shop floor by attributing warehouse locations to each area. I did this alphabetically, creating over 20 zones. After this, I uploaded a spreadsheet to our inventory, attributing the appropriate warehouse location to each item in our inventory. We have about 800 items.
My goal in doing this was not to create extra work for myself but to be able to pick our orders in the exact order that they are arranged on our shop floor. The packing slip is my preferred document to work with when picking orders because it has all the customer and order information on it.
I was under the impression that because there is an option to sort packing slips and pick lists by "warehouse location" that it would sort the products on the order by their location in the warehouse. This should absolutely be a feature for making it easier to pick items on orders. It would make it so much easier for businesses that have large warehouses with tons of product and for smaller businesses like ourselves that have a ton of different products and receive many orders each day. This way, we aren't running back and forth picking items on the list that could be organized by location on the slip.
To be totally honest, I invested a TON of my time making sure that our inventory had appropriate warehouse location attributions, and had to reach out to SS support several times to make sure it would work the way I was hoping it would. I feel like I did all this extra work in vain to accomplish something that could be easily automated, but isn't.
