Inbound Flows in D365 Advanced WMS: Receiving and Put-Away Directives
In my last article on replenishment I closed with a promise to turn around and face the other direction: inbound flows in D365 Advanced Warehouse Management. Purchase order and load-based receiving, license plate receiving on the mobile device, and how put-away location directives decide where received stock actually lands. Outbound gets most of the attention because it is where the orders ship, but everything outbound depends on inbound having done its job. If receiving puts stock in the wrong place, or records the wrong quantity, or leaves a license plate stranded with no put-away, then every wave, every replenishment, and every cycle count downstream is working from a lie. Inbound is the quiet half of the warehouse where inventory accuracy is either won or lost.
THE TWO WAYS STOCK ARRIVES
D365 gives you two main entry points for inbound stock, and the right choice depends on how much you know before the truck arrives. The first is purchase order receiving. You receive directly against the lines of a purchase order, item by item, and the system already knows what was ordered, so it can validate quantities against the expectation. This is the simplest model and it suits operations where receiving is driven straight off the PO and there is no separate advance notice from the supplier.
The second is load-based receiving. Here an inbound load is created, often from an advance shipping notice (ASN) sent by the supplier, and the load carries the expected contents ahead of the physical arrival. Receiving then happens against the load rather than the raw PO. Load-based receiving is the better fit when you want to plan dock and labour around known arrivals, when one shipment spans several purchase orders, or when the supplier sends structured ASN data you want to receive against. The mental model is the mirror image of the outbound load I wrote about in the outbound wave and load strategy article: a load is just a planned container of work, and inbound loads let you treat receiving with the same discipline you give shipping.
Both routes converge on the same next step. Once stock is received, the warehouse no longer cares whether it came from a PO line or a load line; it cares about the license plate that now exists and needs to be put away.
THE LICENSE PLATE IS THE UNIT OF RECEIVING
In Advanced WMS the license plate is the handle the whole system grabs onto. A license plate is a tracked unit of stored inventory, usually a pallet or a container, identified by a single ID that travels with the goods. When you receive, you are almost always receiving onto a license plate: the act of receiving creates or populates a plate, records the item, quantity, unit, and inventory status on it, and parks it at a receiving location. From that moment the plate is the thing that moves. Put-away work moves a plate, not a loose quantity; picking later can pull from a plate; cycle counting counts a plate. Getting the license plate right at receipt, one plate per physical pallet, accurate quantity, correct unit of measure, is the single highest-leverage habit in inbound, because every later movement inherits whatever you recorded here.
Inventory status deserves a mention at the point of receipt. The status assigned to a plate as it is received, available, or blocked, or held for inspection, governs whether that stock can be allocated to outbound demand. If goods need to clear an inspection before they can ship, the cleanest approach is to receive them under a non-available status so master planning and wave allocation cannot touch them until they are released. That keeps unverified stock out of the outbound flow without any manual policing.
RECEIVING ON THE MOBILE DEVICE
Almost all real receiving happens on the handheld, through a mobile device menu item configured for the inbound flow you are running. The menu item is where you decide the behaviour: which work order type it serves, whether it is a purchase order or load receiving flow, whether it generates put-away work immediately or just registers the receipt, and what the operator is prompted to scan and confirm. A well-designed receiving menu item asks the operator for exactly what the system cannot infer, the item or PO line, the quantity, the license plate, and nothing more, so receiving stays fast and the error surface stays small.
There are two broad styles worth knowing. A receive-and-put-away flow creates the put-away work the instant the plate is received, so the operator receives a pallet and is immediately directed where to take it. A receive-only flow registers the receipt and leaves put-away to be generated and dispatched separately, which suits operations that stage everything at the dock first and put away in a later pass. Either way, the principle from the rest of this series holds: the mobile flow should create only the work that earns its keep, and it should ask the operator the fewest questions that still guarantee an accurate plate.
PUT-AWAY: WHERE THE LOCATION DIRECTIVE DECIDES
Once a plate is received, put-away is the move that takes it from the receiving dock to a real storage location, and this is where the two tables I wrote about in work templates and location directives come back into play. The work template with the put-away work order type builds the work header and lines: it decides that a put-away should happen and how the work is shaped. The location directive with the put-away work order type answers the harder question, namely which exact location the plate should land in. This is the same division of labour as picking and replenishment; only the destination logic changes.
A put-away location directive is a set of lines, each with a query and a set of restrictions, evaluated top to bottom. For the plate being put away, the system walks the lines in order and takes the first one whose query matches and whose location has room and accepts the stock. That ordering is the whole game. Put your most specific rules first, fixed pick locations for fast movers, dedicated zones for particular item groups, temperature or hazard zones for items that demand them, and put your general catch-all last so that any plate that matched nothing specific still has somewhere to go. Capacity matters as much as the query: a directive can match a location perfectly and still skip it because the location is full or would breach a quantity or volume limit, at which point evaluation falls through to the next line.
TUNING PUT-AWAY DIRECTIVES
The art of put-away is steering received stock to where it does the most good with the least later movement. Directing fast movers straight to their fixed pick faces at receipt can remove a replenishment move entirely, because the stock arrives where picking needs it rather than going to bulk and then being pulled forward later. Slow movers and overflow belong in bulk, kept out of valuable pick-face space. Items with special handling, cold chain, hazardous, high value, should be steered by directive into the zones built for them rather than relying on an operator to remember. The directive is also where you encode the trade-off between density and accessibility: tight, dense storage for the long tail; accessible, shallow storage for the items that turn over. Spend time on the line order and the capacity settings, because a put-away directive that is even slightly wrong scatters stock in ways that cost you on every subsequent pick.
WHAT GOES WRONG
• Receiving loose quantities, not plates. Skipping the license plate or lumping several pallets onto one plate breaks every later movement that assumes one plate is one handling unit.
• Wrong unit of measure at receipt. Receive in eaches what should have been cases and the on-hand is wrong from the first second, poisoning planning, allocation, and counting alike.
• No catch-all on the put-away directive. A plate matches no directive line, put-away work cannot be created, and the pallet sits at the dock blocking the receiving area.
• Capacity ignored. Directives that match locations without respecting capacity send plates to locations that are already full, and the work fails or overfills the spot.
• Available status on stock that needs inspection. Receiving inspection-pending goods as available lets them be allocated and shipped before anyone has checked them.
• Over-prompting on the mobile menu item. Asking the operator for fields the system already knows slows receiving and multiplies keying errors; ask only for what cannot be inferred.
TAKEAWAYS
Inbound in D365 Advanced WMS comes down to three things working together. Choose the right arrival model, purchase order receiving when you receive straight off the PO, load-based receiving when you want to plan around known arrivals or ASN data. Treat the license plate as the unit of receiving and get item, quantity, unit, and inventory status right at the moment of receipt, because everything downstream inherits it. And invest in the put-away location directive, ordering its lines from most specific to most general with capacity respected and a catch-all at the bottom, so received stock lands where it does the most good. Do inbound well and the warehouse you read about in the picking, replenishment, and counting articles simply works, because it is finally being told the truth about what it holds and where.
Next time I will look at the warehouse mobile device menu in D365: menu items, work classes, and how to design handheld flows that the floor will actually use without fighting the device.
In this series: previous article Replenishment in D365 Advanced WMS: Min/Max, Wave Demand, and Load Demand
In my last article on replenishment I closed with a promise to turn around and face the other direction: inbound flows in D365 Advanced Warehouse Management. Purchase order and load-based receiving, license plate receiving on the mobile device, and how put-away location directives decide where received stock actually lands. Outbound gets most of the attention because it is where the orders ship, but everything outbound depends on inbound having done its job. If receiving puts stock in the wrong place, or records the wrong quantity, or leaves a license plate stranded with no put-away, then every wave, every replenishment, and every cycle count downstream is working from a lie. Inbound is the quiet half of the warehouse where inventory accuracy is either won or lost.
THE TWO WAYS STOCK ARRIVES
D365 gives you two main entry points for inbound stock, and the right choice depends on how much you know before the truck arrives. The first is purchase order receiving. You receive directly against the lines of a purchase order, item by item, and the system already knows what was ordered, so it can validate quantities against the expectation. This is the simplest model and it suits operations where receiving is driven straight off the PO and there is no separate advance notice from the supplier.
The second is load-based receiving. Here an inbound load is created, often from an advance shipping notice (ASN) sent by the supplier, and the load carries the expected contents ahead of the physical arrival. Receiving then happens against the load rather than the raw PO. Load-based receiving is the better fit when you want to plan dock and labour around known arrivals, when one shipment spans several purchase orders, or when the supplier sends structured ASN data you want to receive against. The mental model is the mirror image of the outbound load I wrote about in the outbound wave and load strategy article: a load is just a planned container of work, and inbound loads let you treat receiving with the same discipline you give shipping.
Both routes converge on the same next step. Once stock is received, the warehouse no longer cares whether it came from a PO line or a load line; it cares about the license plate that now exists and needs to be put away.
THE LICENSE PLATE IS THE UNIT OF RECEIVING
In Advanced WMS the license plate is the handle the whole system grabs onto. A license plate is a tracked unit of stored inventory, usually a pallet or a container, identified by a single ID that travels with the goods. When you receive, you are almost always receiving onto a license plate: the act of receiving creates or populates a plate, records the item, quantity, unit, and inventory status on it, and parks it at a receiving location. From that moment the plate is the thing that moves. Put-away work moves a plate, not a loose quantity; picking later can pull from a plate; cycle counting counts a plate. Getting the license plate right at receipt, one plate per physical pallet, accurate quantity, correct unit of measure, is the single highest-leverage habit in inbound, because every later movement inherits whatever you recorded here.
Inventory status deserves a mention at the point of receipt. The status assigned to a plate as it is received, available, or blocked, or held for inspection, governs whether that stock can be allocated to outbound demand. If goods need to clear an inspection before they can ship, the cleanest approach is to receive them under a non-available status so master planning and wave allocation cannot touch them until they are released. That keeps unverified stock out of the outbound flow without any manual policing.
RECEIVING ON THE MOBILE DEVICE
Almost all real receiving happens on the handheld, through a mobile device menu item configured for the inbound flow you are running. The menu item is where you decide the behaviour: which work order type it serves, whether it is a purchase order or load receiving flow, whether it generates put-away work immediately or just registers the receipt, and what the operator is prompted to scan and confirm. A well-designed receiving menu item asks the operator for exactly what the system cannot infer, the item or PO line, the quantity, the license plate, and nothing more, so receiving stays fast and the error surface stays small.
There are two broad styles worth knowing. A receive-and-put-away flow creates the put-away work the instant the plate is received, so the operator receives a pallet and is immediately directed where to take it. A receive-only flow registers the receipt and leaves put-away to be generated and dispatched separately, which suits operations that stage everything at the dock first and put away in a later pass. Either way, the principle from the rest of this series holds: the mobile flow should create only the work that earns its keep, and it should ask the operator the fewest questions that still guarantee an accurate plate.
PUT-AWAY: WHERE THE LOCATION DIRECTIVE DECIDES
Once a plate is received, put-away is the move that takes it from the receiving dock to a real storage location, and this is where the two tables I wrote about in work templates and location directives come back into play. The work template with the put-away work order type builds the work header and lines: it decides that a put-away should happen and how the work is shaped. The location directive with the put-away work order type answers the harder question, namely which exact location the plate should land in. This is the same division of labour as picking and replenishment; only the destination logic changes.
A put-away location directive is a set of lines, each with a query and a set of restrictions, evaluated top to bottom. For the plate being put away, the system walks the lines in order and takes the first one whose query matches and whose location has room and accepts the stock. That ordering is the whole game. Put your most specific rules first, fixed pick locations for fast movers, dedicated zones for particular item groups, temperature or hazard zones for items that demand them, and put your general catch-all last so that any plate that matched nothing specific still has somewhere to go. Capacity matters as much as the query: a directive can match a location perfectly and still skip it because the location is full or would breach a quantity or volume limit, at which point evaluation falls through to the next line.
TUNING PUT-AWAY DIRECTIVES
The art of put-away is steering received stock to where it does the most good with the least later movement. Directing fast movers straight to their fixed pick faces at receipt can remove a replenishment move entirely, because the stock arrives where picking needs it rather than going to bulk and then being pulled forward later. Slow movers and overflow belong in bulk, kept out of valuable pick-face space. Items with special handling, cold chain, hazardous, high value, should be steered by directive into the zones built for them rather than relying on an operator to remember. The directive is also where you encode the trade-off between density and accessibility: tight, dense storage for the long tail; accessible, shallow storage for the items that turn over. Spend time on the line order and the capacity settings, because a put-away directive that is even slightly wrong scatters stock in ways that cost you on every subsequent pick.
WHAT GOES WRONG
• Receiving loose quantities, not plates. Skipping the license plate or lumping several pallets onto one plate breaks every later movement that assumes one plate is one handling unit.
• Wrong unit of measure at receipt. Receive in eaches what should have been cases and the on-hand is wrong from the first second, poisoning planning, allocation, and counting alike.
• No catch-all on the put-away directive. A plate matches no directive line, put-away work cannot be created, and the pallet sits at the dock blocking the receiving area.
• Capacity ignored. Directives that match locations without respecting capacity send plates to locations that are already full, and the work fails or overfills the spot.
• Available status on stock that needs inspection. Receiving inspection-pending goods as available lets them be allocated and shipped before anyone has checked them.
• Over-prompting on the mobile menu item. Asking the operator for fields the system already knows slows receiving and multiplies keying errors; ask only for what cannot be inferred.
TAKEAWAYS
Inbound in D365 Advanced WMS comes down to three things working together. Choose the right arrival model, purchase order receiving when you receive straight off the PO, load-based receiving when you want to plan around known arrivals or ASN data. Treat the license plate as the unit of receiving and get item, quantity, unit, and inventory status right at the moment of receipt, because everything downstream inherits it. And invest in the put-away location directive, ordering its lines from most specific to most general with capacity respected and a catch-all at the bottom, so received stock lands where it does the most good. Do inbound well and the warehouse you read about in the picking, replenishment, and counting articles simply works, because it is finally being told the truth about what it holds and where.
Next time I will look at the warehouse mobile device menu in D365: menu items, work classes, and how to design handheld flows that the floor will actually use without fighting the device.
In this series: previous article Replenishment in D365 Advanced WMS: Min/Max, Wave Demand, and Load Demand
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