Mobile Warehouse Management Solution – New Features for Business Central (Video)

Tasklet Factory gives a brief overview of the basic features that help improve warehouse efficiency in Dynamics 365 Business Central, followed by a showcase of their newest features, including Image Capture and Printing.

Transcript below:

Kate: All righty. So our session today is, of course about what’s new in our solution for NAV and Business Central. Before we kind of jump into that, I’m gonna take some time to introduce Tasklet Factory and give an overview of what’s already in our solution. And then we’ll have some time for question and answer at the end. So just quick agenda, like I said, we’ll kind of go through who we are, our company profile, benefits using us, the technology that we use, who our customers are, and then do a quick demo of what’s already in our solution. And then Peter will talk about some features that are new.

So we are, of course, a mobile warehouse management system for Microsoft Dynamics. We’ve been in business for about 12 years, all 12 of those, we’ve been doing WMS for Microsoft Dynamics. So it’s all we do, it’s all we’ve ever done. And we’re super proud of that. We’ve got over 700 customers in 35 different countries. Offices headquartered in Denmark, but we have a U.S. location as well. That’s where I sit, but I support all of Canada. So anybody who’s watching up in Canada, who works with Encore, and I’ll be the one to kind of work with you and support you there. We also resell hardware. And so it’s not something that we make and manufacture ourselves. But we spent quite a bit of time actually testing out the best handhelds on the market for our solution. And we can absolutely help to get some of those devices.

So let’s talk for a second about why you would implement a mobile WMS in the first place. Let’s say right now you’re keeping track of your warehouse, all via pen and paper. When you receive products into your warehouse, you’re writing down a bunch of numbers on a page of what’s actually in, where it’s going, how many of them there are, etc. and then taking this back and manually implementing them into your ERP. I’m sure we can all imagine ourselves being an employee in a warehouse and just kind of imagine that that’s a multi-step process. And it’s super prone to user error just from misreading numbers or in fat fingering things.

So you can end up with lots of inaccurate information, incorrect orders, all of that stuff is gonna cost you time, money, customer satisfaction, all those things you wanna avoid. So some benefits. So reduce the number of errors, you’ll have more efficient employees, lower warehouse costs, better customer satisfaction, and better inventory accuracy.

So let’s talk about Tasklet Factory specifically, we are super user friendly. This is something that you’ll see from the moment that I actually kick into the demo. It’s a system that’s really intuitive to use and understand. It is on Android OS, it has a two day installation period. So that kind of comes with the caveat, of course, that your warehouse is kind of set up in NAV. But once that’s set up, our installation process is really quick. The solution is really easy to customize. I’ll mention that again a couple times throughout the demo, but anything that you want our system to be able to do or anything that you have set up in NAV, our system can really easily reflect that.

And then finally, we’ve got the offline functionalities. So a lot of times we see warehouses that are in remote locations, or they’re super large, and they only have one Wi-Fi router. And so Wi-Fi can be a challenge and selling new technology can be a challenge in those warehouses. You’ll always need, with any system or as included, you always need to be online to download things from the ERP or upload them back to the ERP. But to kind of compensate for some of those Wi-Fi challenges within the warehouse, everything that you kind of do in between there can be done offline. So I’ll touch on that again in the actual demo. Our technology, like I said, we use Android operating system. The application is a dotnet application, it’s written in C#. We obviously are focusing on NAV and Business Central today but for any of the Microsoft Dynamics ERPs that we work with we can be used on-prem or in the cloud. And that is an option regardless of whether your ERP is actually on-prem or in the cloud.

And then finally, we use MobiControl as a device management system. So you’ll see this for a second too this is kind of what allows us to do really a quick implementation, it allows us to be able to perform support really quickly, because we don’t actually have to be physically on site to be able to use and control these devices. So quick overview of our vertical solutions. And I’m sure anybody watching this probably fits into one of these categories. But we’ve got tons of case stories on our website at taskletfactory.com. And then I, of course, would be happy to talk through any specific case stories. So just a couple of features, I’ll kind of go through everything that comes standard in our solution, and then you’ll see a couple of them through the demo. So receiving items obviously, when products are coming into the warehouse, we’re registering those items. And you’ll see we support lot numbers, serial numbers, anything like that. From there, you can go ahead and put away items, assign a bin to those items that you’ve already received and registered. You can go through and do picking. So that can happen either by picking one order at a time, or we do support tote picking, which would allow you to pick multiple orders at one time. And just keep improving that efficiency.

And you can move items throughout the warehouse to different bins. You can count items as needed. And both move and count can be on a planned or unplanned basis. So this can be something that’s coming as sort of an assignment, if you want to kind of set regular checkpoints to move or count things, but they can also happen ad hoc on fly. You can do negative adjustments for items that are damaged, expired, whatever the case may be, this will be a really relevant application of one of our new features, which is image capture. So Peter will obviously go into that segment of what’s new. You can scan any bin or scan any item and see either what’s in the bin or what bin that item should go in. It’s kind of two sides of the same coin there. Add item dimensions for anything you choose to do that for. You can add a barcode and actually register it into the ERP. If a supplier changes the barcode that they’re using, or a new item actually comes into the warehouse that’s been purchased that hasn’t actually been received before. And that barcode isn’t associated with the product yet, you can do that all through our system as well.

Substitute items, again, this kind of requires some setup on the ERP side, but you can scan any barcode, look up what items can be substituted for it when you’re filling orders and things like that. Printing labels from the mobile device, Peter will touch on that a little bit more as well. We can integrate with any shipping provider that you use, and have some actions on our end to get those items ready for shipment. And like I mentioned, the attach image as well, which Peter will go over too. So I will switch the screen that I’m sharing over to our actual device. Let me make sure I get the right one here. Yeah. So can we see this?

Melissa: Yep, I can see the mobile phone.

Kate: Okay, perfect. So I will kind of take you guys through some of the basic introductory features here. Like I kind of just showed in that PowerPoint, there are quite a few, but I’ll just kind of run through some of the ones that we see used most commonly. So we’ll go ahead and log in here. And it will take us to our homepage. And so you’ve got all those that I went through in the PowerPoint, the same images and titles and all that good stuff. So you’ll kind of see as I go through this, we won’t go through every single feature today. But the ones that we do go through will kind of give you a really good idea or how the other ones look in our set up. You know, like I mentioned, it’s really intuitive, really user friendly. So it’s pretty easy to figure out once you get in the groove of doing a couple of them.

So we’ll start with received. So we’ve just gotten some products into our warehouse and ready to register that we’ve gotten those. Obviously, the least efficient way to do this would be to actually go through and click into each of these orders until we can figure out what we’re trying to work with here. The most efficient way that we can do it is we just go ahead and pick up one of the items in our barrel of things that we’ve received, and just go ahead and scan it. So you’ll hear that beep when I scan a barcode. And this will filter down to every incoming order that that specific item that I scanned is in. So as you can see, we have two left here, and I can just go ahead and scan another product in the order that I’m working with. And we’ll go right into received.

So this is actually the point where we’re allowed to go offline. So we’ve downloaded this list of what we need to receive from the ERP and everything that’s done from here up until we post can be offline. So we will start out with the orange chocolate. And just go ahead and scan that, the system knows we’re expecting to receive 10. So 10 will automatically pop up as being the expected quantity, I can just go ahead and click this green checkmark here to approve that. Now let’s say we do our next item, the Pistachio chocolates, scan those, the expected quantity here says 15. Let’s imagine for a second now that I only count 10. So I can go ahead and manually click on that and edit that number. Click that green check. And as you can see here, this first product where I received all 10 turned green on the right side. And the second one here turned orange, because I’m not actually finished with that.

So let’s say I go ahead and find the rest of those five on the bottom of that of all of those products, I can go ahead and scan it again and confirm the quantity of five. And as you can see, our system automatically knows that we were supposed to receive 15, we’ve already received 10. So there’s five remaining. So I can just go ahead and click that green check as well. Like I mentioned at the beginning, our system supports lot numbers as well as serial numbers. Those are these next two line items here, this peppermint, this golf balls. And like I said, everything’s pretty intuitive. So the same kind of workflow, there just also scanning the lot number and the serial number. But just for the sake of time, today, I will go ahead and post what I’ve done. So I click this little menu button, go ahead and click Post. Here I can enter anything I want. You know, if I’m scanning a barcode for a delivery note or if I just kind of wanna write something in like the date that I received these, it doesn’t matter, you can think of anything you want in there.

Since I didn’t finish scanning everything, we’ll kind of have these guardrails that try to keep everything accurate, and, being done the way that it should be. So since I didn’t actually complete this order, it’ll ask me, if I am sure I wanna proceed. And just kind of draw my attention to the fact that there’s other items in there. But like I said, I’m gonna skip over these ones today. So I can just go ahead and click Yes. You can see the order has posted successfully. So at this point to actually post, we’ve gone back online, and all of this information is now being reflected back within the ERP.

So we will go ahead and put some items away after having received them. So we’ll go ahead and click into put away. Again, we can kind of do the same thing here where we’ve got a bunch of products in front of us. And we can just go ahead and scan one to know which order that we need to get into. So here I’ve got the same two items. And I’ll show you a good one here. So, put these away, scan that item. And now here I actually scan the bin that I’m gonna be placing it into and you can see it comes up with a bin number here and tells me where it’s expecting me to put them. So I go ahead and find that bin number, scan it and it tells me that the quantity should be 10, I can go ahead and confirm that quantity.

Now let’s say I have a little bit of a different situation here. So I’ll scan my next product. And let’s say to start, you know, I do wanna put some of them into the bin that they’re assigned to. You can scan that bin but let’s say here that I only have space for eight of these, for example, I can manually change that to eight. Click that checkmark and as you can see here again, this has turned orange. So let’s go back in and let’s say I wanna put the rest of them away in a different bin that they fit better in or makes more sense for whatever reason, it’ll still tell me where this expected bin is. But here, let’s say I wanna put them in a different bin, I can just scan something else. This will again, just pop up kind of reminding me that this is not the correct thing asking me if I’m sure I wanna do it. And I can go ahead and click Yes.

So the idea here is that I kind of in my mind, compare it a little bit to a bowling alley. You know, imagine you’re going bowling and you don’t have any guardrails, you kind of have to throw the ball right down the middle for it to get to where you want it to go. And within the warehouse, our system is those guardrails. So, whichever kind of avenue that you find works best, whether it’s right in that moment, or how you guys wanna lay out the system, we’ll always just be the guardrails just to make sure everything stays on track, and make sure everything syncs up and is up to date.

So, again, here, remember that I only have seven left to put away. And so I’ll confirm that for that next bin. And here since I did do both of them, it will automatically pop up with this question asking me if I want to post that order. And I can click Yes. And it was posted successfully.

So the next one that I’ll show you guys is pick, we can do this a couple of different ways, like I mentioned, you can pick just one order at a time. And we can also enable tote picking to allow you to do as many as you’d like, at one time. Here, again, just sort of for the sake of this demo, we’ll just go through one. So let’s click into here. And I just wanna show you guys really quickly if you keep an eye on this bottom right, when I click into it, you’ll actually see a lock symbol up here, that again, is just another one of those guardrails for when other employees are kind of looking through what orders actually need to be picked. And that lock symbol will show them that this order is already being worked on.

So I can click into there. And again, it just works in a really similar way, I just go ahead and do my scan of that item that I’m picking, go ahead and scan the bin that I’m taking it out of, confirm the quantity that I’m taking, and we’re all set to go there. Here, we’re picking something with a lot number with these peppermint chocolates. So we’ll go ahead and scan those, scan that bin that we’re taking them from. And then in this case, I’ll scan the barcode for the lot number. And again the system automatically knows that the customer needs five, and then I can confirm that quantity of five and go ahead and post that as well.

So that order was posted successfully. So the last thing that I will show you guys in here is going to be the move function. So imagine, for whatever reason, imagine we’re doing some replenishment, we know we have a bunch of new products coming in and there’s some things around the warehouse that would just fit better in other places. I can actually be assigned to move some products around within the warehouse and then put them in the bins that would make more sense.

So click into that move order, click into this product, scan the bin that I’m taking it from, confirm the quantity that I’m taking. And as you can see, now this is orange because I’ve only taken it from the bin and I haven’t actually completed the action of moving it. So we can go back in there. Scan the bin that I’m placing it into and confirm that quantity again. Go ahead and post.

So I can do that, like I said, that can be assigned, I can do that on an ad hoc basis. And I can also move the entire contents of a bin from one bin to the next with bulk move. So like I went over we’ve got a couple of different standard features here that are really great and really common to use. I will go ahead and sort of kick it over to Peter for the What’s New but hopefully if there are any additional questions or anything anybody wants to see out of these other features, I’m happy to do a more in-depth personal demo for anybody.

Peter: Thanks, Kate, for a great demo. Short and sweet demo. Let me just share my screen here. And just see, can you see anything? You can see my screen?

Kate: Yep, I can see the two, your slides.

Peter: All right, very good. Well, maybe I should just introduce myself first. My name is Peter List. I’m the CTO and founder of Tasklet Factory. And I’ll be taking you through some of the new features we recently added to the product. Of course, we continuously maintain and evolve our product, what you’re looking at here is four years of continuous development on the same app. So all our 700 plus customers use the same app, just with a little bit of different configuration files. I wanna show you something. So the features that I’ll be going through is I’ll show you what we call promoted menu items, something that will help again, make the app even more user friendly. I’ll show you how you can take pictures, how you can use that as documentation in different processes. I’ll show you our new cloud printing, which really removes a lot of complexity from at least when you wanna print and your piece is missing in the cloud, that can be a challenge, we’ve solved that in a nice simple way.

And then I’ll show you some other stuff where if you need to pick multiple items from the same bin, again, some things that will speed things up. A new feature that Microsoft has added, where you finally now can over receive items coming in, we’ve added support for that on the mobile device as well. And then I’ll show you some of the new hardware devices that are available with our app as well, because then that’s another thing. You know, when evolving our project, our app we started out on Windows mobile software, and now everything moved to Android and we moved on our app with it.

All right, I don’t wanna do more PowerPoint than that. So let’s get rid of that. And so what you’re looking at here is two mobile devices that I’m remote controlling. On the left we have one configuration. So if I go into the receive module, we can see we have the menu down here. And inside the menu, we have some goodies that the user can activate. On the mobile device on the right, I’ve turned on what we call the promoted menu items. So anything you have inside this menu, you can make them appear right on the screen so the user can easily access them. So you’re saving a click from clicking on the menu, and then activating it. And also it shows the user what you can do here.

And if we step even further, and if we select one of the orders, let me just show you what happens when I click update here. You saw the lock… Now you can see the lock that Kate was telling you about earlier. If I go into the other order here. Now you can see that, yeah, from a user’s point of view, it’s just much simpler, that you can see, for example, that I can add, if a barcode is missing, I can add that at a cross reference, I can do printing. Yeah. And then what’s not promoted is still here in the menu. But that’ll speed things up, it’ll make it even easier for a new user to figure out what to do.

So while we’re in here, maybe I can… just one more thing I wanna say about the menu items, because all the good stuff that you see out here on the main menu, we can get access to those features anywhere in the app. So for example, locate item, you have that out here on the main menu, but when you use it here, you need to tell the system which item you wanna find when you’re in receiving, and you click on locate item, we automatically transfer the item number so it already knows what it is. So it’s easier to use because we can transfer data between the different screens and kind of make it super simple to use. Also, if I wanted to add a cross reference, when you go in here, it’s ready to do the scan of that barcode that you’re missing. And yeah, all right.

So next thing I wanna show you is how you can take pictures using the mobile device. It’s a feature we’ve recently added, where, anywhere in the app, for example, let’s say we’re doing a receive function on this order right here. And we notice something that may be here that we just want to document. So I can go in and attach an image. So now it’s attaching it to this order, I can say add image, and then the camera of the mobile device starts up. So you can see my very messy table here. But let’s say I’m receiving this box, so I can take a picture of it, it looks kind of open. So maybe it’s a good thing to document this before I move forward.

So you can put in a comment here as well. And do that. And you can even add multiple pictures. So if I open up the box, say, oh, I can see what the content is. And, yeah, put that in as well. All right, so once I’ve done that on the mobile device, these pictures will actually move into Business Central. So you can go get them there. Just go here. And so they’ll end up in what we call the mobile media queue. Go in here and I can do a search for… so this was received number seven. So I can just say, seven. And you can see if I just show you there is a reference to what it’s related to. So I can go in and see, okay, that’s my box. And that’s what the content was. And this is really just something you can take the pictures stored in here, if you need to look at it at some point, or then you have it you have to reference back to the order.

So a feature that is super flexible, something you can use both on inbound, maybe you want it before you ship items out just take a picture before you close the box. And if you are removing items, because they’re damaged using the adjust quantity, maybe you can take a picture off of that, just to document what the problem was. That saves you from writing a long description of something that happened. Because anyway, you try, it’s never gonna be easy to write a lot of text on these mobile devices. So a picture is just a good way of bypassing that. So hopefully, you can see that this is a very flexible feature that you can use in a lot of ways.

The next thing, if you wanna, you can even see the picture on the mobile device as well. So you can go in and look at the attachments. That also means if someone else is taking a picture on another device, you can see it there because now they’re coming out from Business Central. All right. So the next thing I wanna show you is cloud printing. And I think we’ll start the journey just inside Business Central. And so the background for this feature was when Microsoft came out with the Business Central in the cloud, I think to put it nicely, they kind of forgot how to that people needed printing as well, we weren’t necessarily using the web client.

So we introduced something where we can actually use the mobile device to open a connection to a printer and do the printing that way. So we don’t need to connect the printer directly to the cloud. what it looks like in Business Central is that we have a mobile Print Setup, you click on create standard setup, you type in, you need an extra license to get this so you need an extra license per printer that you attach here. And then you get a login for the cloud printing service. Then you put in your printers. So in this case, I have one Zebra ZQ510 printer, I’ve put in, this is the Bluetooth address of that printer and then I can fill so for location. So that means warehouse. So if you have printers on the East Coast, and a warehouse on the West Coast, you can kind of set it up so that the users won’t see those printers, they see the printers that are not relevant.

If you leave it blank, the printers will show up anyway. For each printer, you can assign specific templates. In this case, I have two versions of my item label. Because typically, it depends on what paper you put in the printer, but the printer can do. So here, you can just make sure that if you’re printing out a specific label that you only show relevant printers. I just did the setup, it typically takes about five minutes to get this set up. If you’re a little bit slow, like me. And then it’s pretty much just using it and from the user’s point of view, you go into, let’s go into the order, we select the item that we wanna print for, we just do something, see if I can be a little bit clever here. All right, so this one, I’m just gonna just turn on the printer first, otherwise we won’t look clever.

All right, so I’m gonna attach an image on this device. So you can see I have my printer right here. So I’ll go in and print. I’ll select my… so you get the label designs that are available in the system. And you say how many you want. So that’s the quantity we put in the label, which printer, and then how many copies we want. In this case, we just want one. And now we’ve put out a nice looking label. And yeah, we can start using it attaching it to the items that arrive without a barcode on. So hopefully, all your vendors put on barcodes on the items that arrive. If that’s not the case, for some of them, you can use this feature to print out labels. So you fix everything in the receiving process making all the…put away the movements, the pickings, you make those processes efficient because you have a good barcode on it.

So the templates is something that evolves over time. So we adding different sizes, labels, bin labels, tote labels, we’re doing a delivery note as well. But this is just a system that will keep evolving. When you connect to it, you get access to all the labels that we have. If you need something in our format, if you have a label size that we don’t have in stock, we’ll add it for you free of charge as part of the service. So it’s kind of everyone connects to the same thing getting the benefits of what everyone else is adding to the system. Yeah.

Then I wanna show you something else I have if we go back and look at for example, picking. So Kate was telling you about tote picking we didn’t see it, I have enabled it here. And kind of as part of…maybe I should just briefly explain tote picking. So this is a feature that we developed for our webshop customers, we typically have many orders, but with one or two lines on each order, that means you need to pick from multiple orders to be really efficient. In this case, I have three different customers on this order. But you can see they all need the same item. So I have to go to the same bin. And normally, before we developed this new feature, you were scanning the item, and kind of going through that bin you would scan the bin, you would scan the tote, and then you would kind of repeat that process for the next line.

I’m just gonna step out of this because we’ve added a new feature where instead of scanning the item first, if you scan the bin first, then it actually filters to only show the items that you need to pick from this bin. And it also remembers that I have scanned this bin already so I don’t need to do it again. So here I can just scan the item. I’ll scan the tote or the box that I’m putting these items into and register the quantity and then I scan the item again, scan another tote, register the quantity and I just continue that process making it, let’s do the…I got the wrong one. So I just tried to put the item into a box destined for another customer. So the system, of course gave me a warning there. But now I’ve picked everything into these three and I can do the same for the next process, but I think you get the picture here. Again we’re just saving that extra scan of scanning the bin three times. Now we just scan it one time.

And it may seem like a small thing. But if you’re working in the warehouse, and you do this 1000 times every day, it all adds up. And we really wanna make sure that the people using our system in the past that it makes sense to them. Otherwise, they won’t use it. If the process feels weird, they’re gonna find other ways to do it. And so we do our best to make sure that it feels super relevant. All right, the next thing I wanna show you is that you can receive more than expected. So let’s just go in, and I’ve prepared a last receipt for you guys.

So in here, we have receipt number nine. And at the moment. So the over receiving means that you need to set up kind of and over received code. If it’s not turned on, let me just show you what it looks like. So if I go into receive here, and I take this. So normally, this is how it looked for many, many years, 12 years, we have 12 and a half years, if you try to put in 11, here, the system will block you because standard now for Business Central were not able to handle this before. If I go out, I just got out of the order again. Now go back and say I wanna attach an [inaudible 00:37:14] code. So that means I can do up to 10%. So I’m gonna add that. Then on the mobile device, going to the order again. And then when I put in 11 and say okay, now the system accepts it. So again, here, Microsoft has added a new feature, a feature that was maybe long overdue, some would say, but we implement support for it as well. So we respect how Business Central is set up. So I’ll just do the posting. And now we got our 11 posted and when I update sheet number nine no longer exists. And that’s kind of it for the new features I wanted to show but I just wanna make sure that you know, about our hardware page on taskletfactory.com on Hardware, you find it up here.

If you scroll down, you can see all the devices that we’ve tested our solution on. And this list is evolving every month, new devices come out. One of the cool things that we’ve added, we have for example, if you wanna give your users a hands free option, it typically, in the good old days, you had to buy stuff from Zebra. And this is what’s called a ring scanner that you put on one or two fingers. But to be honest, it is a little bit bulky, ProCloth has added something that’s very lightweight, that you can put on top of your palm. And then if you let’s say you have a picking wagon and you mount a tablet on it as well.

So these two in combination, you can have a hands free setup where you go and you look at the tablet to see what you need to do. Go to the bin, do your scanning and come back to place the items on the bin. But make sure to check out this page here because yeah, this is where you will find the supportive devices. We aim to support all products from Zebra and Honeywell. But things move so fast in this Android world. So there may be a little bit of a delay but that’s our goal to support the full product range from these two vendors. Kate did I miss anything?

Kate: I don’t think so.

Peter: All right. Well, I don’t know if there are any questions that we need to address here or if we just covered everything in one go.

Kate: I’ll just have a look here. It doesn’t look like any questions have come in. So I think we’re good on that front.

Peter: All right, or maybe if just on a final note, so we are, of course working on something new as far as…so we have a product roadmap that we develop against, and some of the new features that will be coming out is that we are kind of extending our app to go into the production manufacturing domain. So we’ll be adding support for consumption directly on the production journals, and also registering output from that and stuff like that. So be sure to tune in for the next session of What’s New where we have that to show you. Yeah.

Melissa: Wonderful. Okay, well, thanks very much to Kate and Peter today, and I guess we can give everyone a little bit of time back. Have a good day everyone.

Kate: Thanks so much.

Peter: Again, we wanna be efficient in everything we do.

Melissa: That’s right.

Peter: All right.

Melissa: Thank you. Yeah. Bye-bye.

Peter: Bye-bye.

Melissa: Bye.