Inbound and putaway

Where to find it: OTO PACK → Operations → Inbound — Open in OTO ↗

Everything a warehouse ships, it first received and put somewhere. How well it was put away determines how far everyone walks for the rest of that stock’s life.

Bins — the warehouse’s addresses

A bin is a location with a name. As the product puts it: “Bins are addresses within your warehouse, representing specific locations where products are stored or moved.” Without them, stock is “in the warehouse”, which is not an answer anyone can walk to. Bins live at OTO PACK → Configuration → Bins, with Add Bin and a bulk import.

The Add Bin form with the Bin Type list open — Fig. 1 — Only Warehouse, Bin Name and Bin Type are required — everything else refines the address or the rules around it.

Field	What it does
Warehouse ^required	Which building this bin is in.
Bin Name ^required	The address itself — what a picker reads and what a scanner returns.
Bin Type ^required	What the bin is for. See below.
Zone	The section of the warehouse this bin belongs to, which is what makes zone picking work.
Aisle · Rack · Shelf	The physical coordinates, as three separate fields.
Bin Capacity	How much it holds, so putaway does not suggest somewhere full.
Preferred SKU	The product that belongs here. This is what turns putaway from a decision into a confirmation.
Bin Responsible Users	Who owns this location — so a count that does not reconcile has someone to ask.

The layout is structured, not encoded in the nameWarehouses usually bury the layout inside the bin name — A-12-3 and everyone learns to read it. Here Zone, Aisle, Rack and Shelf are fields in their own right, so the system knows the shape of the building rather than just a string. That is what lets a pick path be ordered by where things physically are, and what makes a renumbering something you do in the data rather than on every label.

Bin types

The type is what makes a bin behave differently from the one next to it.

Type	Purpose
Receive / Transfer	Where inbound goods and incoming transfers land before they are processed.
Put / Pick	Ordinary storage — the shelves stock is picked from.
Pack / Ship	The benches and staging areas at the outbound end.
Sorting and Sorting Station	The sorting work and the physical station it happens at, separated so a bench and the bins on it are not the same object.
Trolley	A bin that moves. A picker’s trolley is a location like any other, which is how stock stays traceable while it is being carried.
Return	Returned goods awaiting inspection.
Adjustment	Where a stock correction lands, so the discrepancy has an address instead of vanishing into a total.
Storage / QC	Reserve stock and goods held for inspection.
Non Sellable	Stock that exists but cannot be sold — damaged, expired, quarantined.

Sellable and non-sellableThe distinction is carried by the bin, not by a flag on the product. Damaged goods, returns awaiting inspection and quarantined stock sit in bins that do not feed available inventory, so stock sync never offers a customer something that cannot be shipped.Moving a unit into a Non Sellable bin is therefore a commercial act as much as a physical one: the storefront stops offering it the moment it is put there.

Zones

A zone is a larger section of the warehouse, configured at OTO PACK → Configuration → Zones with Add Zone.

The Add Zone form — Fig. 2 — A zone is four fields — and two of them are what make zone picking work.

Field	What it does
Warehouse Name ^required	The building the zone sits in.
Zone Name ^required	What it is called.
Picker	The person this zone’s work goes to. Assigning a picker to a zone is how a picker stops walking the whole building.
Default	The zone that takes work when nothing else claims it, so no task is left unassigned.

Bins are attached to zones from the Bins tab — select bins, then Update Zone from the tools menu. Configuration also carries Users, Teams and Vendors alongside Bins and Zones.

Receiving

Inbound orders are created and processed at OTO PACK → Operations → Inbound, and received in the app on the Inbound page. Receiving is a scan against what was expected, which is where a short or wrong delivery gets caught — while the driver is still there.

The Operations screen on the Inbound tab — Fig. 3 — Operations is the desktop counterpart to the app, one tab per stage: Inbound · Outbound · Putaway · Packing · Shipping · Dispatching Units · Wave Picking · Sorting · Return.

Column	What it carries
Waybill Number	The carrier’s reference for the delivery.
Type	What kind of receipt it is — a purchase or replenishment, a transfer, a return.
Responsible	Who is receiving it.
Order Date · Delivery Date	Ordered and expected, so a late delivery is visible before it is a problem.
Ingoing Warehouse · Ingoing Branch	Where it is landing — building and branch.

Every column carries its own filter in the header row, and new receipts are created with Add Inventory Order. Goods arriving against a purchase order come in the same way; purchase orders themselves carry Vendor, Requested By and Shipping Term, at OTO PACK → Purchase Orders.

Putaway

A putaway task is created automatically once an inbound order is processed — receiving does not end with goods on the dock, it ends with an instruction to shelve them. One can also be raised by hand from Operations → Putaway.

Column	What it carries
Product Name · Quantity	What is being shelved, and how much.
Suggested Bins	Where the system thinks it should go.
QTY Put · Bin Location	What actually went away, and where. Empty until the work is done, which is what makes a half-finished putaway visible.

Lines are added one at a time with Add New Row, or in bulk with Import by Template for a large receipt. The task opens at status New Order. The work itself is done either way:

	In the app	On the dashboard
Path	Menu → Put	Operations → Putaway → Start Putaway
Flow	Select the putaway order, choose the item and destination bin, assign quantity, Complete.	Enter quantities, SKUs and destination bins by hand, then Complete Putaway.

A single receipt can be split across several bins, which is how a pallet of one SKU gets distributed to the pick face and the reserve at once — the QTY Put column is what keeps that honest.

Suggested bins

Putaway suggests where each item should go, from the bin’s Preferred SKU and its remaining capacity. The point is not to save a decision but to make the same decision every time: stock that lands wherever there was room is stock nobody can find twice.

Replenishment suggestions

When a pick-face bin runs low, the system proposes moving stock from reserve, so picking does not stop at an empty shelf while a full pallet sits two aisles away.

Easy Put

The ad-hoc counterpart: a quick transfer between any two bins, started by a person rather than by a receipt.

	Putaway	Easy Put
Triggered by	An inbound order, automatically	A person, manually
Shape	One source, many destinations	Between any two bins
For	Systematic shelving	Unplanned movements — consolidating, clearing, correcting

Reached at Menu → Put → Easy Put in the app, or the Easy Put button on the Putaway tab.

The alternative is worseWithout Easy Put, an unplanned move either goes unrecorded — and the stock is then lost in the system while sitting in plain sight — or it becomes a paperwork exercise nobody completes. A two-tap transfer is what keeps the record true.

QC and stock areas

Goods that arrive damaged, fail inspection or come back as returns are put into bins that hold them out of sellable stock until someone decides. The separation is physical and recorded at once, so nothing waits in an undefined state.

WMS API

Merchants running another WMS as the system of record can drive this one over the API — inbound orders and inventory updates — so OTO PACK handles execution while the external system keeps the books. The endpoints are documented in the OTO API reference.

Picking methods — zones and bin layout decide how picking performs.
Inbound inventory — GRN, gate entry and transfers.
Inventory count — counting the bins set up here.
Hubs Management — bins and trolleys defined per hub.

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Inbound and putaway