Handling multiple stock locations or warehouses

Question

The Magento database contains the table cataloginventory_stock with a single entry in there called 'Default'. I know this is the place to start for handling multiple stock locations.

I'm wondering if any of you have had experience in this and what the pitfalls are.

I'm looking to:

1. Be able to track product stock across various physical locations (shops/warehouses/etc)
2. Be able to identify where a product's stock is to be picked from for each customer order

If anyone could provide a link to an article or tutorial on this or just share their experience going down this path that would be great. Whether you've developed it yourself or have used a third party module, I'd love to hear from you.

Edit: I ended up writing my own multi-inventory module that adds extra rows to the existing cataloginventory_stock table. It required overriding a few observers and models that check the stock location. In many places the stock ID of 1 was hard coded into the core.

In another project I have used Demac's multi inventory location module. While it's not perfect, it worked out of the box and is written well. I was able to easily extend and customise it for my needs.

Answer 1

There are at least two ways to implement a multi warehouse in Magento; we discussed about this topic during a Magento U course.

The first is that of exploiting the fact that Magento is virtually ready to use multiple inventories as you higlighted. This is the most complex way because you should implement indexing logic.

The second way is that of simulating a multi warehouse by customizing magento product page giving the ability to specify a quantity for each inventory and saving their sum on the default quantity field upon product save.

On order placement you have to implement a custom logic to determine which inventory to decrement (or increment upon order failure).

I will implement a proof of concept of this during a workshop in next november, I will be glad to share my results.

Answer 2

There are a few extensions that allow you to do that. As a temporary solution for one store, we just added attributes with the locations and ran a conditional script to tell the pickers where to get the items from.

Answer 3

Yes, you can create custom attribute for product as "location", In admin panel go to

Catalog->Attributes->Manage Attributes

Create your own attribute for each product and while creating product store the location [location id] etc.

For more information to create custom attribute for product check out this link

http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/tutorial-creating-attributes-custom-fields

and you need to add this custome attribute to quote and order also check this http://www.atwix.com/magento/custom-product-attribute-quote-order-item/

Thanks