Work Orders – Brand Flow Feature Walkthrough | ShipHero WMS Guides

If your team spends any time working on special projects, you know that managing them well is a full-time job. Give your warehouse team the tools it needs to make special projects easy by using Work Orders, now available in ShipHero’s WMS. Work orders manages and records every step in the process of special projects, including inventory movements, project progress and time management. We created this feature knowing it could fundamentally help your teams work better and we think you should give it a try!

Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of ShipHero Feature Walkthroughs, I’m joined today by Valerie Cancian, our associate product manager, how are you today, Val?

I’m doing fantastic, how are you today?

I’m good, thanks for asking. So today we will explore Work Orders, correct?

That is correct.

Awesome.

All right, so let’s jump in. So I guess first question is what’s a work order? So Work Orders is a new feature that we’ve come out which is available now in ShipHero. And what it allows is for you to submit a task or a pretty much like a request to build a SKU in this case, like a preassembled kit. So in ShipHero we had something referred to as a kit where you could have this parent SKU and you could assign components, but then when your pickers went out, they’d have to pick each component and then pack each component and then ship it. What we learned is a lot of customers want to preassemble these assemblies, these kits, and have the finished product sitting on a shelf. So it’d have the box and all the components and that would be one SKU. People were doing this outside of ShipHero, they’re deducting inventory and using spreadsheets and all of these different tasks to pretty much accomplish this. And we decided we need to get that into ShipHero. That way all the inventory is tracked, everything is logged. You can submit this request to build a certain SKU. You can track what’s being done, what’s being deducted, what’s being added all within ShipHero, so this feature, Work Orders will allow you to do this. It’ll also allow you to submit other requests in sort of this custom open format or you can just put in some sort of reminder to do a task and again, track your progress on it, which I’m gonna show you how to do all of that. So let’s see on my screen here is this is our Work Orders dashboard.

This shows you the Work Orders that you have to complete. I am here today in a brand account. So this is for those in a brand account, in which case I’m making the Work Orders for my team, for myself, this is to track progress within my warehouse. So you’ll see which ones I have here. You’ll see which warehouse they’re for, what type. So that assembly is creating the kit, we also have custom, which I’ll show you, the date that I wanted this done by, the schedule date. This is internal for where I would like to start working on it, when we create the work order together, I’ll show you how these two dates are really useful. Just a quick overview of the status, how they’re going, the name that you choose. And then you could also see these little actions here when these items were picked, when they were being built and then when it was done. So it gives you a quick overview of all the different tasks, these different requests that you have put in. For filters, we have the order status filter. So as you have some completed or closed Work Orders, if you don’t wanna view those by default, you can hide them here. And then if you want to look into them later, you can view them. This could be exported and you could also hide some of the columns if you’re not interested in the order ID. There you go, it’s gone. But before we jump into creating a Work Order, we are gonna have to create our assembly SKU first. So we’re gonna move over into app.ShipHero over here, which many of you may be familiar with. And we’re gonna go to our inventory page, inventory products, and we’re going to make one of our SKU a assembly SKU. So what this means is we’re going to tell ShipHero which components we want to build this SKU. So for our example here, I’m gonna do a yoga box because I like to do yoga or I pretend that I like to do yoga and this SKU here, we’re gonna pre-build this box. I could make it a kit and have them pick all the components, but I don’t wanna do that.

This is the big seller for my store here. So I’m going to build everything and put it on the shelf complete, so first thing I need to tell ShipHero, hey, I’m gonna be assembling this SKU. So when you go to your details on your SKU page, hit the little edit icon and you will see it says this is an assembly SKU used in Work Orders, very full sentence here. Once you click this, ShipHero now knows this is gonna be an assembly SKU. So a few things to note. An assembly SKU behaves like a regular SKU. It can have a location, it will have it on hand, it can be picked, it can be packed, all of that good stuff. Just to note, an assembly SKU cannot be a kit. The reason being is a kit doesn’t really exist, it’s just its components, so if something is a kit, you won’t have the option to make an assembly SKU. You would have to make it not a kit first pretty much. But once you are done with that, you’ll have assembly SKU components and you will be able to start adding in what you would like for this assembly SKU. So this is yoga themed. I’m gonna have a yoga mat which I had previously added. We’re gonna do a yoga block, which is very useful when you’re not very flexible. You need like some help, yoga strap here. Again, very useful when you’re not super flexible, you can change how many of these.

So generally it’s good to have two yoga blocks for this kit, we are going to update the assembly component quantity to two, all right, so we’re gonna need two of these, a mat and a strap, now you can also, so what’s cool about Work Orders and when you’re making this, in this specific example, these SKUs, I’m also selling individually, which is fine ’cause everything’s in ShipHero. We’re tracking if the yoga block is being sold on an order, we know that. And then the stuff being used for this Work Order, you’ll see we’re gonna hold that aside. But you also can make your components like materials. A common use case I was hearing is you could put like a box or you could, if you’re wanna literally assemble something, you can be, you know, a tent. And then the components are, you know, the the canopy for it, the different rods for it, the zipper. And then those items are not sold otherwise. But you can make the work order and actually pre-build this tent. Excellent, so once this is created, you have your assembly SKU, it’s good to go. You will be able to search for assembly SKUs that you created from your inventory page, go to is assembly, yes. And it will filter and show you any of the other SKU that you had created this, you can turn, say you build a work order, you’re done with it and now you want to make it a kit. You can do that but you’d have to un, you have to remove the assembly components, uncheck it and now you can make it a kit, that kind of thing. But you have to make sure the quantity is zero if you’re gonna be doing that ’cause kits can’t have any on hand.

So you wanna be cautious if you’re gonna be switching back and forth, definitely reach out for support before doing too many changes on that one but you are able to modify it later on. Okay, so we created our assembly SKU. Let’s get to making our work order. So going back to our dashboard on our top right here, we gotta create work order. And now you’re going to follow a step by step. So to guide for creating it, if you have multiple warehouses, you’ll be asked to choose a warehouse. You do need to make sure you have permissions to access the warehouses, which we just saw I did not, so let me go address my permission. It does check your allowed warehouses and all of that, which will make sure a user who is not supposed to be using that warehouse does not have access to that warehouse.

Makes sense.

All right, so choose your warehouse and this is your requested date. So this is when would I like this work order done by, when do I need these yoga kits sent out? So I would like them done by the end of this month. Now I can name this, you could be as specific as you would like. So my yoga box and this is a restock that I’m sending to some big box store that we will not name. And then you have your option for assembly work order and custom Work Order. So I wanna briefly touch upon custom Work Order. We won’t go through that fully cause it’s pretty straightforward. But for custom Work Orders, what you can do is upload just instructions like a note if you want to track your team like move sort of inventory or cycle count a certain item and you just kind of wanna upload it and then your team knows to go then and make that cycle count, you can upload instructions, you also can upload attachments. So if you have some sort of tasks that you would like them to do, we support a lot of different types. We support PDF, doc, PowerPoint, Excel, we also support MP4 as well. So you can upload a little video with instructions if you want them to do some sort of task and you need to put the instructions there. You can pretty much submit this all in ShipHero.

So that’s a, the custom workflow. And then you would create this and it would pretty much just have the task and then you can just mark it as done. But we’re going to focus on the assembly work order ’cause a little bit more interesting and has a few more extra steps for the assembly Work Order. You’ll have to choose which kit are we building here. So we see we have our yoga starter box, these are our items. It’s showing you how many of these I have available and we are going to choose that. And then you’ll see here there’s a configuration. So we know already that you need two blocks per box, one of these, one of these, that’s already stored. This is more for internal use if you have some sort of code you would like to use or some sort of special packaging, any sort of extra note, it’s completely optional but you can put that in and this will show you, I’ll show you later where you can find this information. And then you’ll be asked how many you would like to create. So we see here how many we have available. What’s good to note is if you are, you can make your Work Orders in advanced, so if you know, maybe you don’t have enough yoga mats yet but you have a PO coming in, you can pre-make this. It will let you proceed if you go above this number in terms of creating it, but you won’t be able to build it until you actually have the items. But this is giving you a guideline of what you actually have available and as you’ll see here, I put that we’re gonna create 50 of these since we need two. This defaulted that, I’m gonna have to pick a hundred of these, 50 of these and 50 of these and that is all set. Once you’re done, hit continue. And then similar to the custom one, you’ll now be able to put in notes, packing details, any specific instructions that you would like, place. And if you’re assembling, as I mentioned earlier in my our strange tent example, you could put certain instructions for the assembly if you would like. These are optional though, you do not need to put anything here. And then you can do attachments, so if this is a work order, you might be requesting a lot. It may be easier to have all your instructions saved and like a PDF of sorts and that way you could just upload it and all of the instructions are there and if it’s something more complex, you can put pictures of what it should look like done. Especially if this is for maybe a client that has very specific requirements, you know they want the label faced up and they want it placed. You can put a picture of exactly what it should look like and that way your team can reference it. The attachments will be very useful for cases like that. But again, it’s optional.

You don’t have to do attachments if you don’t want. So we went through each of our steps, then we hit create work order, all right, work order created and it shows right up on top of my list here, my yoga starter box. Currently I got no schedule date because that comes in a bit later and it shows right up on the top of my list. So now I’ll come in, I’ll see what Work Orders I have. You can look at the schedule date, see which ones you wanna focus on. We’re gonna take a look at our new one. So we’re gonna click in here and we could set an internal schedule date, you know, looking at everyone’s shifts when we’re gonna have some work to go pick all of these, when do we wanna start this? This date’s internal, you don’t have to set a schedule date, it’s just there for you for scheduling purposes. Some people may have a lot of Work Orders coming in and you’re gonna wanna prioritize them. And of course you could set some as like by just priority. But this helps you schedule. Okay, we’re gonna work on this one on Wednesday and we’ll start this one on Thursday. It’s just an option, so set a scheduled date and we’ll look over, we have a lot of different, a lot of information here. So you’re gonna see how many kits you need to create, how many items, different items per kit, how many total items you need to pick, that configuration previously, if I had typed something it would be over here, your kit requirements. The two yoga blocks for the one for the one is always visible here so they can refer back to that. How many you are building, these barcodes are for your yoga starter box. When it’s completed you’ll be able to print those out. You can assign pickers and packers just to track who was working on this here, you can add additional attachments, add additional notes, for 3PL accounts that are linked to billing, they can add charges that will then go to 3PL billing. As a brand account, you can use this to simply track how many man hours you spent and how much time. This doesn’t currently link to a specific billing, but it’s visible for you to see if you wanna just internally track how much time, you’ll see your instructions and then a timeline which tracks all of the progress done on your work order. So for Work Orders we have some steps. So in progress it’s sort of like a pending, you haven’t moved anything yet, you haven’t picked anything yet, but you’re reviewing it, you set your schedule date, you’re gonna get to it.

But once you’re ready to pick it, we wanna update our status to ready to pick. You could leave a note, this is totally optional. You could put, you know so-and-so is, you know, is ready to pick or anything, everything is logged in the timeline. This is just for additional information as you’ll see here. It was me who moved this to our ready to fix status. So on the kit view here you can see that the amount to create is actually editable. This is intentional in case you realize while making this, you need to make more than you thought, or perhaps you didn’t have as many on hand as you thought you did or some something came up and you realize, nope, we’re not making 50 of these right now, I wanna edit that. That’s completely fine. What you would do here then is simply update the amount that you would like to create, which will then update the amounts you need to pick for each of the SKU and then we’ll hit save. And now you only need to make 25. You’ll see it updates here, but don’t worry, this is all updated in the timeline. You’ll see that the items were updated and now we’re going to get ready to pick these, so we have 50 of our blocks. We need to tell ShipHero where are we picking these from. So we’ll go to the assign and it’ll show us all the locations that have this item. None of our locations have 50, which is okay, we can choose multiple locations, we’ll hit add. And then we want to tell the system how many we’re taking from each of these locations. The reason this is useful is there might be a situation where you’re gonna wanna empty out certain locations, not actually use everything in another one. It’s not always that you’re going to be nice and clean with the 25 and 25. This allows you to take a few from a location that has more and then maybe pick from several locations that have three and four and just kind of combine them. It’s designed to be flexible. That way you can either pick everything from one location or pick them from multiple locations, whatever works for you. And then we’ll do the same for our yoga mat here, we’ll just go with one location for this one, we’ll choose for this. All right and we also need to choose a staging area. So what’s a staging area?

So the idea for Work Orders is we’ll pick all the components and now we need to move them. We’re gonna do an inventory transfer and put them somewhere where no one else can touch them. The idea is these components are now being used to build these Work Orders. So we don’t want anyone picking these components, we don’t want them being used for replenishments. We also don’t want them being sold really anymore as individuals ’cause they’re now gonna be part of this box. So we wanna move them to a location, a staging area that’s not pickable, it’s not replenishable and it’s not sellable. So all of these will be there, they shouldn’t be touched. Now we can use them to build our assembly SKU. So that’s what we wanna choose for a staging area. So I mentioned these locations are special, so let’s take a quick look at what that might look like. So when you’re using Work Orders, you may want to look into creating a staging area. Now you don’t have to, this can technically be any sort of location, but for this purpose it’s good to see what a staging location would be. So we’re gonna do this as staging location A. We’re gonna make it not pickable, it’s not sellable and we’ll just save that as that. And then we also wanna make it so you can’t replenish from it, so we have a sitting here, do not replenish from, and if you check that off, it won’t show on the replenish report. So everything here should not be touched. So what we’ll do is we will now go in and assign this at staging A. All right, we’ll hit save. Okay, so once we choose our locations, we have our staging area, you’ll be able to print your picking sheet which will show you the location, your quantity to pick. And now you’ll send someone out to go gather or send multiple people out to go gather these items and bring them over to your staging area once you have everything. And this can be modified still at this point. So if they go over to A5 and we think there’s 25 and you get there and you realize, ah, there wasn’t 25, you can change this location or add another location and be like okay we got the 20 that was here. That’s why this being editable is very useful ’cause you can tell us, okay, we actually only took 20 from here and that’s fine. And then you could add another location that had the remaining five, at this point this is all still editable, but before you move to the next step, you wanna make sure this is accurate ’cause we move to mark as assembly, what’s gonna happen is ShipHero will deduct everything that you picked from these locations, so 25, 25, all of this will be deducted and it’s all gonna be moved inventory transfer to this new location. Now this is logged in your inventory logs, you will see that these movements were done. This is just moving everything over for you and now that it shouldn’t be touched, so this was accurate. We’re ready to move this over to staging. We’re gonna mark this as assembly in progress. So we’ll click here. Again, optional note, you can be like confirmed by manager, everything is accurate or something like that and they could sign off on it, but it’s optional. All right, now we’re in assembly in progress. So at this point these have already been deducted.

So if you go and check these locations, this will show that it’s not there anymore. If you check the inventory logs, this will show that this was deducted and now everything is here. Someone goes up to the staging area. If you have a barcode in that area and they scan it, you’ll see everything that should be there. So it’s all tracked, everything’s accounted for. And now you’re gonna start building these. So here you would look at your kit requirements, you know, download any of those attachments that you may have had, look at your instructions and start assembling this. As these are put together and it doesn’t have to be at once. You can start receiving them. Now you’re receiving the completed box. This is my two yoga blocks, my mat, strap altogether and now we’re going to go put that somewhere. So we wanna mark a receiving area. So you have a few options, you’re receiving area could be a pickable bin, you know, I built these first five, we’re still working on the other 20, but I built the first five and I wanna put these in a pickable bin so we could start shipping them. You know, maybe orders already need them, so we wanna put these directly in a pickable bin, that’s fine. This area could also be like a transfer location, which is sort of like a cart, in which case you could put them there and then someone else can now go take that cart and go put them in a different location depending on how big your warehouse is. But this can be a pickable, sellable location ’cause now we want to sell these completed yoga boxes.

So we’re going to choose a location here, for this example, I’m gonna go with one of my transfer locations ’cause I’m gonna build these, put these on a cart, I’m gonna hit save and now we’re gonna receive these five. So once we hit this button here, what’s gonna happen is all of these components are gonna be deducted from staging, we no longer have them, they’re now part of this other SKU and the yoga, fully yoga starter box is gonna be received. So we’re gonna do a transfer and there you’ll have it. We updated our first five and now if we go to our yoga box, which previously it didn’t have any, we see that we have our five on hand. If you go to our bins, you will see that we have them in our transfer, everything’s being tracked. And then if we check our components, let’s say our yoga block for example, I know some people love every, always wanna make sure everything is tracked. So we wanna just show that. All right, our yoga block, you’ll see here it got moves to staging, how many, since two per box, that’s why it was deducted by 10. You’ll see the movement of 25 from these two locations being moved here. So the whole transaction is logged as well as if you go to your inventory change log, you will also see all the movements. So to your transfer location, everything from staging, all of those movements are all tracked so you can continue building these. Great thing is you don’t have to do it all at once. So I can build some here, be like, okay, good for today, goes back, you see that it’s in assembly in progress, I can move over to a different one, okay, I’ve done 10 of these. I wanna keep now packing my winter set and someone, you can work on these, it’s very flexible. You don’t have to do them all at once. Some use cases I’ve heard get mentioned is if you wanted to build like a thousand, you’re probably not gonna get all a thousand done in a day. So you could work on this over days, over weeks, it will just track it and then as you receive it, you can start selling it.

You don’t have to wait for all a thousand to be done, which is a huge perk. And then once you are done, you can mark this as done. So let’s show that, so we’re gonna do the remaining 40, transfer, you’ll see this goes green, it is done. If you try to do more than this, you will get an error because the transfer was already completed, also note, the staging area doesn’t have anything else in it right now ’cause we have now depleted it so it won’t let you do anymore. But this is now done and then you can hit mark as done. You can put a note, you don’t have to. Here you go. It is complete. Again, everything logged in the timeline and it’ll show as completed here, which will give you your last little mark here. And that is Work Orders from beginning to end, creating the assembly SKU, creating the work order, and then going through completion, that’ll make sense, Dano?

Awesome.

No, absolutely, absolutely. Super detailed, yeah, totally makes sense. Super intuitive as well.

Awesome, thank you.

No, thank you Val. And if you’d like to check out other feature walkthroughs, click on the top right corner right now and if you’re ready to unlock your eCommerce fulfillment superpowers, visit ShipHero.com to schedule a call with us. Thank you for watching and have a great day.

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