How to avoid two pickers accidentally working on the same pick list?

[thuth]

You can fill in the “Picker” field of pick lists in SBO, and it will be displayed in the app, but that is all. Any attempts at solving this issue via additional features poses significant challenges.

Variant 1: Only let pickers open pick lists assigned to them. This has the problem that the warehouse loses flexibility. Often the employee who should take care of a pick list will change ad-hoc, and technical limitations on who can open a pick list only leads to confusion and frustration.

Variant 2: Lock a pick list once it’s been opened by someone. Let's see how this would need to be implemented, after which the problems with it will become apparent:

1. There needs to be an additional UDF on the pick list that says “locked”
2. Every time you open a pick list in the app, it needs to:

• Run a query to make sure the pick list is currently unlocked.
• Send an update to change the UDF value to locked.
• When you close the pick list, send an update to change the UDF value to unlocked.

We would now be faced with the following issues:

• Opening/closing is too slow: Employees may want to quickly look into a few pick lists without really beginning to work on any of them, and if the app has to execute the query/lock/unlock steps every time, this will become too slow.
• Unlocking is unreliable: An employee may open a pick list, not really start working on it, but leave it open on the device. (Either because the user was not instructed properly that this causes issues, or because they were distracted and forgot to close the list.) This again leads to confusion and frustration.

For these reasons the app doesn't attempt to solve the problem where two pickers may accidentally start working on the same pick list. The employees must communicate with each other to make sure this doesn't happen.