Get started with Locations

Purpose

Locations holds the places where product is held, handled or changed, such as farms, processing plants, warehouses, landing sites and offices. This page explains the main ideas, shows where the module lives and points you to the article for each task.

Before you begin

You need:

• A Wholechain account and permission to view and edit master data in the account you are working in. If you cannot see an Add Locations button or cannot save a change, ask your administrator about your permissions.
• For a single Location: the Location name, the Trade Partner it belongs to and, ideally, an identifier from your own system, such as an ERP site code.
• For bulk uploads: Microsoft Excel or a compatible spreadsheet program. Bulk uploads accept .xlsx or .xls files.
• Valid numbers for any GLN or DUNS you enter. Wholechain checks identifier numbers, and invalid values are rejected.

Key concepts

What master data is

Master data is the reference information that your traceability records point to: who your partners are, where things happen, and which products you handle. You enter it once and reuse it every time you record an event or share information. Clean master data makes every later record easier to enter and easier for your partners to trust.

What a Location is

A Location is a physical place where product is held, handled or changed, such as a farm, a processing plant, a warehouse, a landing site or an office. Every Location belongs to exactly one Trade Partner. When you add a Location, you choose the Trade Partner it belongs to, so that Trade Partner must exist first. Locations that belong to your own company are attached to your own company's record, the self Trade Partner.

Trade Partner, owner, Network Status and building owner

Four different ideas are easy to confuse:

• The Trade Partner is the company a Location is attached to. It appears in the Trade Partner column of the Locations page.
• The owner is the Wholechain account that holds the Location record. It appears in the Owner column. The account that owns a record is the one that can edit it and decide who it is shared with.
• Network Status tells you whose Location it is. It shows Self for your own company's Locations and External for Locations that belong to other Trade Partners. It appears in the Network Status column.
• Who owns the building is a real-world fact that Wholechain does not track.

Example: a shared warehouse. Pacific Cold Chain Logistics runs a cold-storage warehouse that stores product for several companies. In your account you add one Location, "Pacific Cold Chain Warehouse", and attach it to the Trade Partner Pacific Cold Chain Logistics. Your account owns that Location record. The warehouse can then be used in your records for any product you store there, without being copied for each customer.

Identifiers

A Location can carry more than one identifier.

Location Groups

A Location Group is a named set of Locations that you manage together, for example every Location in one region or run by one team. A group contains Locations but does not own them. Deleting a group does not delete the Locations in it. See Location Groups.

Data policies

A KDE (Key Data Element) is a single piece of information that must be recorded, such as a product name or a license number. A data policy lists the KDEs you expect and how strongly. Data policies must be switched on for the whole account in Organization Settings > Account, in the Compliance section (Admin only). A policy set in Settings is universal, for all Locations. For a Location Group, the policy is a sub-group of the universal policy. It is managed on the Location Groups sub-tab of Master Data Settings > Location, and also in the Data Policy tab of the group drawer. A policy for one Location is set only on that Location's details drawer. The values themselves are always entered on the individual Location. See Share a Location and set its data policy and Data Elements and Policies.

Other terms

How Trade Partners and Locations fit together

Locations and Trade Partners are separate modules that work as a pair. A Trade Partner can have many Locations, and every Location belongs to exactly one Trade Partner. Traceability events answer "what happened, where, and with whom": Locations answer where, and Trade Partners answer with whom. The connection statuses that describe how a Trade Partner is linked to your account are explained once, in Get started with Trade Partners.

Before you can record or share events for a shipment, the Locations and Trade Partners involved must exist in your master data. Setting them up first means events can be created from a pick list rather than typed each time, and the identifiers on each event match what your partners expect.

A good order of work is:

Find the Locations module

Common actions

Articles in this guide

The Reference Guide has one chapter for each screen and topic: Module overview, Locations list, Adding Locations, Location details, Location Groups, Archive and restore, Rules and restrictions, Export files, Messages and Glossary.

Settings that affect Locations

Some options apply to the whole module and live in Settings. They are not repeated here. Click the gear icon at the top of the Locations page (or open Settings with the gear icon at the bottom of the left-hand navigation bar), then go to Master Data Settings > Location.

• The External Identifier Manager, the account-wide alias bulk upload, Download master data and the Vessels switch are described in Master Data Settings. The Vessels switch controls whether vessels can be added as Locations in your network. It applies to your whole account, so change it only with your administrator's approval.
• The Data Policy switch for the whole account (Admin only) is in Organization Settings > Account, Compliance section; see Account settings.
• The Data Element Library, KDEs and data policies are described in Data Elements and Policies.
• Archived Locations are restored in Master Data Settings > Archived, as described in Archived.

Expected result

You know what a Location is, how the Trade Partner, the owner and Network Status differ, and where to open the Locations and Location Groups tabs. You can pick the right article for the task in front of you.

Troubleshooting

• I cannot see Add Locations or cannot save a change. Ask your administrator to check your permission to edit master data. See Users and Permissions.
• The Trade Partner I need is not offered when I add a Location. Every Location must be attached to a Trade Partner that already exists. Add the Trade Partner first. See Add Trade Partners.
• A GLN or DUNS number is rejected. Wholechain checks identifier numbers, so check the digits against your GS1 or Dun & Bradstreet record and enter the number again.
• A file will not upload. Bulk uploads accept only .xlsx or .xls files.
• Something else. See the Locations FAQ or contact support@wholechain.com.

Field and action reference

For the full lookup reference, see Module overview and the Glossary.

Records and how they relate

Key concepts

Pages and tabs