Well, if my problems with upgrading to v9 are not bad enough, I now have an issue in the Stock Entry, Material Transfer area.
It does not appear the developers thought this through very well. If you have to transfer a lot of items from one warehouse to another, you need a fast and accurate way to populate the form and execute the transfer.
To make that work we have set all of the Item Id’s in our system equal to the barcode of the item (while not ideal, at least it should work). With this done, one should be able to simply start a material transfer and use the barcode scanner to populate the correct items into the form. So, to set this up and see the problem do the following:
- open Stock Entry
- click the New button to open a new stock entry
- change the Purpose field to “Material Transfer”
- Select your Source and Target warehouses
- click in the first Item ID field to begin entering data
(NOTE: The barcode scanner has been programmed to had a TAB key as the termination character after the scan data. This generally moves the cursor to the next field for filling forms.)
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scan the first barcode
(You can simulate this by typing in a code and pressing the TAB key) -
the cursor moves to the Quantity field and fills that field with “0.000”
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This forces the user to backspace over all of those zeros in order to enter a Qty.
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If you delete all the zeros and fill in a real quantity, then press TAB again the cursor drops down to the next line so you can enter the next item.
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You will have to press TAB a few times to get to the Item ID field, but we solved this by printing a barcode with the extra TAB’s on a sticker and placed it on the laptop. This allows us to scan the sticker on the new line and we are at the Item ID again to scan the next barcoded item.
The problem is the DEFAULT action of the Quantity Field. It automatically fills itself with “0.000” and forces you to backspace over them in order to enter data.
Now, I am prepared to hear how some people will say “Oh, just click on it and it highlights so that you can just enter a number and move on.”
Well, that makes no sense at all. I have 4 loading dock doors and each door handled 4 trucks each day. Each truck must get loaded with anywhere between 150 and 300 different Item ID’s to be transferred each time. Each truck only gets 30 minutes of dock time to complete their load for transfer, otherwise the loading docks will not be clear for inbound deliveries the rest of the morning.
The only fast and accurate way to do this is with a barcode scanner! However, if they have to backspace over all the zeros, or move a mouse and click, it doubles or triples the time it takes to get that item on the list and on the truck.
Yes I know you can do these thing like move a mouse or try to click somewhere on the screen, but I challenge you to do that accurately on an outdoor loading dock where the temperatures can range from -32degC (0degF) to 41degC (105degF) and it can be humid, rainy or even snowing. I challenge anyone to do that every day and make less than .05% mistakes. The only way to make that happen is to use a barcode scanner, but the user interface is configured incorrectly.
I have a paid service contract with ERPNext Support for Self Hosted system. I asked them several days ago how to simply change the default value of the Quantity Field. Their response was to use one of the methods I described above that would inject more human errors and slow everything down. They have no idea how to change the default value of the Quantity field.
All I really want is for the Quantity field to act just like the Item ID field and remain blank when I tab into it!!!
It seems nobody really thought this through. Why force such slow and error prone processes when you are working in business system that you must rely on for accurate data?
Frustrated again.
(And no I do not have any idea how to use GitHub to create a ticket. I am in implementer, not a developer)
BKM