I recently saw the question ‘What does Match packing quantity do?’. Match packing quantity is a Strategy that can be set on a Location directive action, and I realised that I had no idea what it did. Even worse, neither did the internet.
The documentation reads: This strategy is used to verify whether a pick location has the specified packing quantity. This will only work for location directive of type Pick. An answer which is sufficiently wishy-washy that no-one could say it was incorrect, without actually telling you what it does. (Although I have just submitted a pull request to update the documentation, so maybe it will improve).
In my head, I had decided that the strategy had something to do with the Packing quantity field that can be found on the Sales order and Transfer order line, but I took a look at the code to see if I could see if this was true.
The code related to this Strategy is in WHSLocationDirective#matchPackingQty, and the part that is doing all the hardwork is:
I’m no developer (and those of you that know me can stop laughing, thank you), but I think that says find a record in InventReserve where the Available physical = the Packing Quantity, and where the License plate Id is not blank.
The first thing that tells me is that this Strategy won’t work if there is no License plate Id. And then I guess (because I don’t really know what WHSInventReserve has in it) that the License plate must have a quantity (available quantity) which matches the Packing Quantity. What this doesn’t tell me is where the Packing Quantity comes from. Is this the Packing Quantity from the order line, or something else?
All I can do now is build a scenario to test it….
In summary, I think that Match packing quantity will find a Location which contains a Licence plate which has the exact quantity required by the shipment line. Which means that it will ignore Locations which are not Licence plate controlled. It also means that the Item ‘Packing quantity’ and the Order line ‘Packing quantity’ are not relevant for this functionality. If you think different, please let me know!
