Hello guys. I got a question about multiple warehouses vs locations. In what cases that you actually need to have multiple warehouses because seriously it adds a whole different layer of complexity to Odoo. However, Locations seem to be much more simple. Say someone has a medium retail store where he has a small storage room for On-hand inventory just in case he needs it. However, his purchasing orders and shipments go to a separate warehouse. In this case, which option is better for him? Warehouse or Locations? Thanks a ton guys!!!
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In Odoo, a Warehouse is the actual building/place in which your items are stocked. You can setup multiple warehouses and create moves between warehouses.
A Location, is a specific space within your warehouse. It can be considered as a sublocation of your warehouse, as a shelf, a floor, an aisle, etc. Therefore, a location is part of one warehouse only and it is not possible to link one location to multiple warehouses. You can configure as many locations as you need under one warehouse.
Warehouses need two steps (a delivery followed by a receipt) to transfer goods between them.
Locations need one step (an internal transfer).
If you do not use the same staff and/or the same equipment, or if you have to do more than drive a forklift across the parking lot to move between your "storage room" and "separate warehouse" then it is probably better to use Warehouses instead of locations.
If it is ever possible to have an item get damaged or go missing during movement between two places (or pay a fee), then those two places are best modeled as Warehouses.
Prefect and reassuring explanation. Thanks Ray.
Does a warehouse or location have capacity limits? how can you setup capacity in this case?
In our case, our orders are molded and then dried. So we have ovens or Kilns that can take more than one order for drying and I am wondering how to setup. Should I make the racks and Kilns as warehouses, locations, or workcenter?
in our case, Orders go on racks (1 or 2 per rack), racks go into 3 kilns (capacity 4,6,7 racks). I would like complete trackability of Kiln vacancy and rack vacancy + when the order is completed. orders to know when to take them out of Kilns and which rack is empty.
Warehouses and Locations do not have capacity limits. You can always see what is in a location. As part of your planning process you can review the Inventory in a particular location. There is no way that I know of to instruct Odoo to use capacity in the way you are asking for Locations. Work Centers out of the box don't really support more than one order at a time. I think you would need customization.
We've just done a deployment (v17), and there's a practicality to consider. Inventory adjustments and import's do not play well with virtual locations. We had no problem with warehouses. And physical locations (such as a partners/customer location) worked most of the time.
Knowing what I know now, I'd make the root of all locations a warehouse, and create locations based on that.
Ex.
WHChicago1/Stock/shelf1
WHChicago1/Field/Field Location1
WHChicago1/Repair/Repair Vendor 1
WHLeasing/Customers/Installed
WHLeasing/Delivery/Truck1
So the warehouse becomes used for both physical locations, and "virtual" locations - not odoo virtual locations.
At least not until locations are all treated the same.
I don't know where the issues stem from - Perhaps a warehouse maintains several fields that help keep track of counts and their ties to financial data? Virtual locations "silently" fail. A workaround was created to load into a warehouse, and then move it using a transfer to the virtual location.
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