Im not sure which channel this question is best suited for, so dropping here. Is there a way to have Automatic location assignment exclude a location based on bin available inventory? Example: Warehouse is ranked first for ALA, but only has the inventory for a sales order in a bin meant for holding returns. We want ALA to move on to the next location because we want to exclude the return bin.

I normally isolate that bin in a virtual location instead of just a bin

I don't think so it's possible however it might be possible by sales channel order reservation.

Call the Location "Quarantine" and then create a bin for each real location - assign the bin within the quarantine location to see where it actually is

I may be wrong for your exact application…but our company recently started using the status function to mark returns and other inventory as unavailable for sale. This allows us to hold inventory in our main warehouse location inside of a bin location but not allow our normal workflows or waves to see that item.

Oh, that's a decent idea, but should be noted inventory status leads to all kinds of fun side effects. Test thoroughly in sandbox before implementing

@Eric Anderson thats how we use our bins, we have a return bin for each warehouse and store location that our POS system ignores any bins from those special bins, I will look into the status function

@KevinJ of Kansas does make a good point though. Test throughly in Sandbox because there are side effects and one of them is that everything is required to have a bin. You won’t be able to just store items by warehouse location. That makes using POS slightly more of a headache as you would need at least one bin location in every warehouse location.

we are actually using bin locations like inventory statuses 😞

Another note is that once status is turned on and used there is no going back. We used to do that but once Status became available in WMS and were more accessible to our mobile scanners we started using them. We simply have one status for available and one not. This could all be fixed if NS would just allow us to mark bins as available or not, but that isn’t part of their native behavior. I don’t know why. Status is their fix I guess. Our big issue was that as soon as a stock PO had an IR those products were available for waves even though they hadn’t reached the bin put away stage. So we would get many many waves and pick tickets for items with no bin locations. It started to split orders and made a mess. Now with slightly modified WMS modules, which wasn’t very complicated, by default items are received into the inbound staging status, which isn’t available for sale yet, and then automatically changed to the status of available in the put away function.

Our problem with Inventory Status was that native NS could still pick inventory in a status deemed unavailable, it is just that WMS/waves wouldn't suggest them. So if anyone is not using mobile WMS, and using a pick ticket, inventory can still get picked and used for an Item Fulfillment. Using a sublocation/bin was how we had to handle it.