Descartes® is pleased to announce the latest release of Peoplevox. This update includes various improvements designed to enhance system performance and user experience. Below, you'll find a summary of the changes implemented in this version. For any questions about specific items, please reference the associated number (if provided) when contacting Descartes Customer Support.
In this release, we are releasing some components to support the new action creation mechanism. We are also fixing some minor bugs related to the new fields introduced to help manage stock take and cycle counting.
Tip: Use our Ideas Portal to our Ideas Portal to submit your Enhancement ideas for Descartes Peoplevox. Click here for additional information and instructions for requesting access to the Ideas Portal.
As we continue the migration of screens to the new web app styling, we will move the older version of each screen to legacy mode. The older versions will remain available for the immediate future, but you are encouraged to use the new screens wherever possible. Also, we welcome your feedback on the new screens. Your input helps us to ensure that the new screens meet your needs before the legacy screens are switched-off at a later date. The new versions of those screens include:
Locations
Location groups
Removals
Sites
Returns
Reports
Dashboards
Thank you to everyone that has provided feedback on these screens so far. Please rest assured that we are reviewing all feedback and have several enhancements planned to implement many of those changes that you have proposed.
Highlights
New screen related to action creation: Action creation activity
The goal for our revamped action creation process is to let you pre-define many of the settings and parameters that previously required manual re-entry. Additionally, it enables the system to automatically create those actions on a regular schedule. As a part of that, we are providing you visibility on those automated action creation activities. In this release, we are deploying some of the first screens to support that:
This new Action creation activity screen allows you to see the results of any attempt to create an action – whether that is through future automation, or the current manual process. You will be able to see who created the action, as well as a list of the sales orders that were passed to it.
In the future, this screen will also link out to the action profile, which is the template that you will use for saving those action creation parameters.
From this activity screen, you can review the actions that were created, as well as any faults that occurred:
Typically, these faults will be allocation issues, indicating that one or more items need to be replenished. Up until now, these allocation messages have been presented during the final popup window of action creation. We will continue to display them in the popup, but this new activity screen allows you to access this information even if you close the popup.
The new activity screen will be available for actions that are created using our new back-end mechanism, which we are rolling out and enabling on an action-by-action basis, starting with "One person picks one order" actions. You'll see more of these action creation activity records over time.
Currently, we plan to limit the history of these activities to the last 30 days. If you have a use-case for needing a longer history than that, please contact us to discuss your needs.
New Features and Enhancements
🟪 We are continuing work on the new action creation process. This involves having a background task actually create the action, so that the user does not need to remain on the action creation page in order to see the results. Initially, this new asynchronous action creation will be enabled for "One person picks one order" actions, with more to follow. (1237654)
Resolved Issues
🟩 We resolved an issue with the CSV import of sales orders that prevented orders from being cancelled. Specifically, if the import was attempting to perform a partial cancelation of an order (i.e. some items were already shipped and the import was attempting to cancel the outstanding lines) while also changing the on-hold flag on the order. This import now successfully cancels the outstanding item lines. (1066325)
🟩 We resolved several issues related to searching for and updating the new stock take frequency and last stock take timestamp fields on locations. The system will start tracking the stock take timestamp against each location in the near future, and once the new cycle count actions are ready, we will be able to start automatically creating those actions for locations that have a stock take frequency defined. (1255665, 1255682)
Preview of Changes Coming Soon
Put away improvements
We've received feedback on the recent put away rules and we're working on some solutions and improvements. Thank you to everyone who reached out – your feedback here is incredibly valuable. Below is a brief summary of some of the challenges that were identified and our current thinking around potential solutions. We would love to hear your feedback on these topics as well.
🟦 We are making some changes to the way the new put away rules work in relation to checking previous location usage for each item. Currently, the rules allow you to guide operators to a previously-used location, but do not allow you to define a sort condition to ensure that it is the most recently used previous location. We're still experimenting on the best way to solve this, but our current line of development is to provide a filter condition that will specifically look at the most recently used location of a given type (pick, bulk, quarantine, potentially despatch if useful).
🟦 Related to that, we are also looking at making a series of improvements to the performance of the rules. Each rule relies heavily on live, up-to-date information about the current state of the warehouse, which can often mean running some complex calculations during the rules. We are exploring ways to save more of that data during other warehouse transactions so that the rules can simply read information rather than having to run a complex calculation.
🟦 We are exploring ways to prevent the rules from providing the same location suggestion for multiple products in a batch. Specifically, if multiple products need to be put away to an empty location. Currently, each put away suggestion is generated in isolation, without context of any other rules being run, and the suggestions for all products in a batch are generated at the same time. This means that if one rule directs a product to an empty location, a second rule for a different product may direct the user to the same empty location because it still views it as empty. We're planning a two-step solution here:
Initially, we're looking to introduce an automatic refresh of suggestions that may be "stale" before we show them to the mobile operator. For example, if the first item directs the user to an empty LocationA, then before we show the next suggested item(s) bound for LocationA, we refresh the suggestions. That will introduce a small delay while the system recalculates the destination, so we will also provide a role-level permission or configuration switch to allow you to decide whether that delay is more impactful than having the operator skip the put away.
Longer-term, we want to expand the put away rules to generate actions, the same way we would for a pick or a replenishment. This would allow each rule to have context of any suggestions that have already been made, including those being performed by other operators. This part is contingent on some of the ongoing action creation work, so we will need a little more time before we can implement this piece.
Descartes ShipRush
You can also find the latest release notes for ShipRush here: