We’re pleased to announce the release of OrderFlow 4.2.4. The start of 2022 has been a very busy period for new projects and customer launches, but also for the development of new OrderFlow features. We’ve listed some of the highlights below, which cover both of the releases since our last announcements, namely 4.2.3 and 4.2.4.

The new release provides a unified approach to overriding the handheld confirmation mechanism. It is now far easier to configure handheld operations to support scenarios where a product or location barcode may not always be available.

We’ve taken a close look at the processes around short picking and can now support a far more powerful range of options for handling short picking exceptions. As part of this work, we have also reviewed the mechanism for selecting alternative locations, refined the move of damaged stock during a pick, and introduced a standalone process for moving stock to ‘damaged’ locations.

With OrderFlow 4.2.4 there is now a standalone feature on the handheld GUI to support splitting cases and cartons into smaller units of measure. Previously, this was possible as part of certain pick and stock move processes.

We’ve created a simple ASN-based receipting process which can be used for cross site transfers within OrderFlow. Despatched items can be used to generate a ‘trusted’ ASN (advanced shipping note) which is available to operators in target site. Using this ASN, it is possible to receive in bulk through a single action, rather than line by line.

We’ve added a new flavour of handheld-based delivery receipt, which allows you to create licence plates on the fly, rather than having to pre-print these prior to receiving stock on the handheld. We have also added the ability to identify non-barcoded products in a delivery from either an ASN or purchase order, if one of these is present.

In OrderFlow 4.2.4, we’ve added some further improvements around the use of licence plates. Among these include:

• a new dashboard to show summary information on licence plate stock
• a modified order line assignment mechanism to allow for multiple whole licence plates to be matched against a single order line
• the ability to manually add orders for specific licence plates

We’ve added a new feature useful for customers using Royal Mail international services for larger orders. A two kilogram limit currently applies for shipments using these services, which means that a shipment split rather than a package division is necessary in order to despatch multi-item orders that exceed this weight. A feature to handle this case has been added in OrderFlow 4.2.4.

We’ve made some improvements to the handheld ‘advanced’ rolling stock check functionality. Information is presented on the number of eligible locations to check, on a per area basis. The system behaves better when the end of a stock check area is reached. OrderFlow will now automatically close down a stock check activity if all of the eligible locations have been checked.

We’ve made some improvements to make better use of modern handheld scanner web browsers, which these days are very similar to those in use on Android phones . OrderFlow’s handheld functionality has been designed in the past to accommodate older browsers with limited JavaScript capability. With OrderFlow 4.2.4 it is easier to plug in more advanced scripts which take advantage of powerful libraries such as JQuery, used elsewhere in OrderFlow.