By: Evart Bos
Using Dynamics 365 for Operations’ Advanced Warehousing application, each warehouse user becomes a location with a location profile that is taken from the warehousing parameters. This location is created behind the scenes when you create warehouses workers.
Why do we need such a location? When the warehouse worker is between a PICK and a PUT, the inventory is located in this user location. (You may consider the user location to be the forklift the user drives.) A little surprising maybe, but it makes sense and it normally works fine. See below for a few of those user locations, created automatically. The location ID is the worker ID. Notice the field “Location profile” with the value “Use.” This came from the warehouse parameters.
What can go wrong with this? One could easily make a mistake in timing. When we want to be proactive and enthusiastically create warehouse users before we have entered a user default location profile in the warehousing parameters, we have created an unworkable situation. The warehouse worker will not be able to do anything. The user logs into the mobile client, goes through the steps of scanning data and clicking OK, and everything looks fine; but when the mobile step gets to the point of the PICK, the system will send the error:
License Plate Specified on a non-license plate controlled location. Update has been cancelled.
Most of us have seen this error before, and normally, this is easy to fix. We take the message literally and correct that checkbox on the location profile. But we can’t take any action now. The physical warehouse location I am using for the pick is license plate controlled.
What the system is really complaining about is that secret user location – and that user location has no location profile! The system is really saying the following:
I can’t find the location profile for the user location of the user that is currently logged in on the mobile client, so I have no idea whether that location is license plate controlled or not.
See below for the warehouse parameter that sets the location profile for the user locations. It is filled in correctly as shown below. Warehouse workers that are created now, will get this profile.
NOTE: The profile of the user location in this parameter has to have ‘yes’ specified for license plate tracking.
Now that we know what caused the error, we can easily fix the problem by going to Location profiles, as pictured above. We can easily find the location associated with our warehouse worker and update his location profile. Now we are back in business, we can ship and receive again.
What the system should do to prevent the problem is to warn the user when warehouse workers are created while there is no location profile set up yet in the parameters for the user location. This would be consistent with the functionality when creating locations interactively. The location profile is then a mandatory field.