Monday, July 2, 2012

Fishbowl Inventory Batch Print Packing Slip and Pick Report

As par of the productivity gains services that we offer recently we came across a problem where a warehouse personnel was as part of their shipping and handling routine in Fishbowl Inventory software had print 2 pieces of paper for each order (Packing List & Print Report). Each one of the reports took series of clicks and screens in order to produce final print - in total 16 clicks per order. Now count that on busy days there are about 600 orders and you get one seriously sore index finger.

So we took a deeper look at the process and came up with solution that would batch print entire order load for the day in just 5 clicks total. This report includes two individualized subreports "Packing List" and "Pick Report". There are several things that can cause pain points:

  1. make sure that you are producing and compiling report in the correct version of iReport Designer from Jasper Software. You can find correct corresponding versions to your Fishbowl Server here
  2. Make sure that your iReport Designer is installed on same server as the Fishbowl server and that it has all Fishbowl .jar files added  (by default this is installed C:\Program Files\Fishbowl\lib). For us installing iReport on separate box could not compile valid reports
  3. Master Batch reports "path" parameter should be empty "" and should be passed on to subreports as well as the "module" parameter
  4. We wanted 2 subreports for each order to be printed back to back so insert page break between two subreports
Lastly there is pretty good number of questions answered on Fishbowl forum & Fishbowl Wiki so I would start there if you have any questions first. Here is our final batch report appropriately called "Batch Pick Pack" (by the way our report has two optional parameters to constrain Order number range and may not be appropriate for your situation - they are Greater Than Order and Less Than Order).