Building Open Stock

Open Stock is what you may be more familiar with as Virtual Inventory Management. It provides the opportunity, free of any additional charge, to create storage, secured or not, for a whole range of items not kept in a Cribwise cabinet, and in a three dimensional form that you choose and build yourself to match your requirements

In this article is covered:

How Cribwise inventory is constructed

How to create an open storage device

Finding your newly created device

Assigning items to your open storage

Construction of the Cribwise Inventory System

The first thing to remember is the way Cribwise refers to the different elements of your customer's installation. (Figure 1)

.Figure 1

1. Stock – Can be useful if just one portal, but perhaps the customer has more than one ‘device’ (ie with link) and maybe these are in different locations, like Warehouse 1 and Warehouse 2 for example. Many people don’t have this kind of size though and just have the one device, so that will be just the one ‘stock’

2. Device - this consists of a computer link, with any associated storage devices. The link is what you will run the Shop Floor Interface (SFI) on

3. Storage Device - this refers to a physical cabinet. So each Device may have several storage devices, or just one. 

4. Storage Module - the shelf or drawer of a cabinet

5. Stock Location - the final exact location to be used by an item

For the purposes of creating Open Stock, you will treat it as adding a new Storage Device to your overall device, just like you would add another physical cabinet.

How to create an open storage device

Data Management > Devices > Double click on the device you want to add the open storage to > Click on the storage devices tab > Click the plus sign to add a new storage device (Figure 2)

Figure 2

You will now need to construct your storage (Figure 3)

1. Name it

2. In this menu, you choose the type of storage - if it was an actual Cribwise cabinet, you would choose the type here. With open storage, you select that

3. The dimensions go here - in this example, think of bookshelves - we have 3 sets of bookshelves, 1 to 3. Each bookshelf has 10 shelves, 1 to 10, and each of those shelves is divided into 2, 1 to 2.

You can add a stock location dimension but this is not required.

4. Make sure you save your storage device

5. Now click on release to enable it to go live. Once you have done this you will be able to open the tab Stock Locations which will give you a list of every location you have created

Figure 3

Finding your newly created device

Follow the steps to navigate to your devices list and you will see your newly created open storage device listed under the device you have attached it to. (Figure 4)

Figure 4

Assigning items to your open storage

Now that you have open storage, you will have access to an SFI from which to run it. This works just like the SFI on your link for your physical machines, with a few steps (like a 'click to finish' to replace the normal drawer close detection) to make it work as an open system. Find that SFI by replacing adminportal in your URL with shopfloorinterface:

secopoint.secotools.com/adminportal/shortname

secopoint.secotools.com/shopfloorinterface/shortname