Locations

Sterling Store Engagement is location aware and makes it easy to track and have a real-time view of your inventory.

Order fulfillment and inventory management comprise processes such as picking, packing, and shipping orders, receiving, moving, and counting inventory, and so on. It is critical to capture and track inventory at granular levels for these processes. In Sterling Store Engagement, you can configure stores to be a single-location or multi-location store depending on the size of your store and your business needs.

By default, stores are configured as multi-location stores in Sterling Store Engagement.

Single-location stores

When you configure a store as a single-location store, Sterling Store Engagement creates three locations, by default, to enable tracking of inventory as it moves through the various stages of order fulfillment:

DEFAULT-LOCATION - The location where all the inventory is tracked.
PICK-VIRTUAL- The location that the system requires to track the inventory that is being picked.
STAGING-VIRTUAL - A virtual location where system moves the inventory that is picked and kept aside for customer pick up or to be packed for shipping. The inventory is automatically moved to the STAGING-VIRTUAL location after it is picked.

For more information about configuring a store as a single-location store, see Configuring single-location stores.

Multi-location stores

In multi-location store, inventory is tracked at granular level locations and you can define the locations to suit your business requirements. The staging locations are physical locations where actual movement of inventory happens. There can be multiple staging locations depending on the size of the store.

For example, you can have a specific staging location to hold the products picked for pick-up orders and another location for ship orders. During backroom pick, the store associate places the products for pick-up orders in the staging location that is dedicated for pick-up orders and scans or enters that location. Similarly, products for ship orders are placed in the staging location that is dedicated for ship orders.