MPH WMSFulfillments
How picking, packing and stock deduction fit together
A fulfilment is the record that stock left the building for a specific order. It is what deducts stock, what an invoice is built from, and what a shipment is attached to.
This page explains the model. For the screens your operators actually use, see Operations.
Three flows, chosen per warehouse
Under Settings → Warehouses each warehouse decides which fulfilment actions it offers and which is the default:
| Action | What it does | Suits |
|---|---|---|
| Create pick list | Splits the orders into persisted pick lists by zone. Packing happens later from the shared pack queue | More than one picker, or a warehouse big enough to split into zones |
| Pick | Pick now, pack later from the order | A picking round followed by a packing round |
| Pick and Pack | One pass. Creates the fulfilment and books the shipment at the end | Small operations, single-line orders |
When you select several orders at once, the actions offered are the intersection of what their warehouses allow. A mixed selection only offers what all of them can do.
Quick Ship is a fourth path: scan an order number and go straight into pick-and-pack. See Quick Ship.
Handling status
While work is in progress the order carries a handling status of Picking or Packing. It is empty the rest of the time.
It exists so that two people do not start the same order, and so you can filter the order list by what stage things are at. If someone abandons an order halfway - the classic case is a picker going home - reset it from the order's action menu, or from the order list.
What creating a fulfilment does
- Deducts stock FIFO across batches, oldest first.
- Writes an outbound movement per batch consumed, snapshotting the unit cost of those specific units. This is what makes cost of goods sold accurate later.
- Releases the matching allocations.
- Moves the order to Partially fulfilled or Fulfilled.
- Reports back to the sales channel, if the connection is set to do so.
Partial fulfilments
You do not have to ship everything at once. Fulfil what you have, and the order stays Partially fulfilled with the rest outstanding. Each fulfilment gets its own record, its own shipment and its own invoice, and appears separately in the order's Fulfilments section.
A short pick produces exactly this: the picking view asks you to confirm, then fulfils what was actually picked.
Fulfilment and shipment are not the same thing
A fulfilment says stock left. A shipment is the carrier booking that carries it. Usually they are created together, but not always:
- Pick and Pack creates both, and books the label automatically.
- Pick creates neither until you pack.
- A fulfilment flagged needs manual booking exists without a shipment until you book one. See when auto-booking does not happen.
- Some warehouses deliberately block customs orders from being packed at all, so they can only be picked and then shipped by hand. See Warehouses.
Fulfilment actions
From the order's Fulfilments section you can email or resend the invoice, print the invoice, and Create shipment. Per shipment: open the label, print documents, refresh tracking, or cancel.
Reversing a fulfilment
Reversing puts the stock back and reopens the order lines. Use it when goods never actually left. If they did leave and are coming back, that is a return, not a reversal - the difference matters, because a return records what condition the goods came back in.