Count distance between letters in ER code

JMast

Reputable Poster
Hello All,

I have a situation where I need to know the distance between two letters in my UBE ER code. Is there a business function that will provide the ascii or Unicode values so I can do the math? The scenario is for our warehouse. For the purposes of picking orders, they want to know how close the products are in the warehouse aisles. The idea is to identify pickslips where all the products are fairly close together for faster picking. So, I would like to do something like the following. Sort the lines by location. Take the first letter of the first location and the first letter of the last location and compare. If the "distance" is less than 3, this is a candidate for fast pickling.

We do not use advanced warehousing.

Thank you for your help,

Jer
 
Jer,

I think you'll have to create a C business function to convert the character to its ASCII value, or you could also create a custom UDC, where each character would represent a unique UDC value, and the ASCII value is the UDC description. Then you could just take the value of the description for doing your math -- without having to have a C business function. Just a thought.
 
Could you not try a string loaded up with ABCDEFGHIK etc and then Find Position in a String using what you said above.

Or this guy....
N4600540 - F4100 Calculate Proximity. It requires people to enter the locations actual grid coordinates though. Or coordinates from a reference point.

As your method is relying on the fact they are physically laid out alphabetically. that's not always going to the be case in rows
In this example of 2 rows

ABCD
EFGH

H is closer to D than E is
 
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Thank you both for excellent suggestions. Both the UDC and position in a string options will work well. I got stuck in ASCII land and didn't think outside of the box.
 
Welcome :)
Those 3 coordinate fields work well too mind as they are true actual positions but require a lot of setup. I used them at an older site
I asked our warehouse guy what he does here and we use look at the putaway sequence field WSQP and the LA05/LA06 for this kind of stuff

If you are interested, I also wrote something that helps people pick like orders in batches. That also speeds up picking
 
John, putaway sequence sounds like advanced warehousing, am I missing something that we could be using? I hear you on the coordinates and it would be interesting to do, but our warehouse is a simple setup. While D is actually closer to W than to K, the conveyor running down the middle makes it farther. So, the simple find position in a string is sufficient.

We have a batch picking process in place, one of the drivers for my project is to identify and get orders funneled into that process so it is used at a higher capacity for the small orders.

Thanks again for your time,
Jer
 
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