What is Autostock
Autostock is a merchandiser and technician option on the kiosk to verify, validate and resolve the inventory.
Autostock can be run as many times as you wish as it is designed to assist you and resolve problems.
Reason for Usage
Autostock is used to make sure the kiosk is up to date. It can for example be used for the following:
- You have manually put in new or old RFIDs.
- You are unsure of the kiosk status and want to verify it.
- RFID’s have failed to read, and you want to fix it.
- The kiosk has troubled slots, and you want to make sure those work.
Aborting or Partial Autostock
When doing an autostock, it is important to let it finish and autostock all slots. This is for it to know that all the RFIDs are correct because when the autostock completes. It will run the below procedures (from the table) to correct things. And it will perform that on all slots in the kiosk. This means that a partial autostock may still have wrong RFIDs in those slots you did not stock.
UI Buttons
Before starting an autostock you need to initialize the system, the Initialize button can be used whenever you want to set the robot into a well-known (good) state.
The Stop Autostock and start/end values are shown in lower opacity to indicate that it should only be used by very experienced technicians.
What Autostock Does
Autostock will do the following to restore the inventory and fix issues. The estimated chance approximates how likely any of these are to happen compared to each other.
| Estimated Chance | Explanation | Result |
| HIGH | This is the normal procedure of checking all the slots. This is the only thing that autostock previously did. |
Set the correct RFID for each slot.
|
| HIGH | Checks if a RFID was found. | Removes ‘troubled’ status. |
| LOW | Check if an active reservation had a RFID, but no reservation code. | Frees up the RFID. |
| MEDIUM | The RFID was in a slot, but the status of the reservation was set to not in kiosk. | Finishes reservation. |
| LOW | The reservation had an active status to be in the kiosk, but it had no slot ID. | Finishes reservation. |
| LOW | The reservation had an active status to be in the kiosk, but no reservation code. | Clears the line. |
| MEDIUM | The reservation had an active status to be in the kiosk, but it’s RFID had no slot ID. | Finishes reservation. |
| MEDIUM | The reservations RFID was on the wrong slot ID. | Set it to the correct slot ID. |
| LOW | The reservation RFID existed in multiple slots. | Set them all to troubled. |
| LOW | The reservation should have been active in the kiosk, but it had no RFID linked to it. | Clears the line. |
Note: That many of these should not be able to happen nor has happened. But regardless, if it ever does happen, we can handle it.
Results
When the autostock is completed, it will show you a messagebox with the result. The expected result is for there to be no rows. But if there are rows, that means the system has helped finish unresolved things. There is nothing more you need to do regarding the result from the message box unless in 1 situation that is explained below.
Below you can see an example of a possible result. Here there were a few issues and in two cases it set the slot to troubled. In that scenario an RFID was found in two different slots. You need to correct that and then you can run the autostock again.
The results are logged to a file on the computer located: D:\Log\ R50_Process XXXX-XX-XX.log
There is also a list showing whether the system found RFID and/or a box helping you to guide on the things you can resolve by yourself.
If there is an RFID in a slot even though it said it did not find one. Then it might be positioned poorly so try to adjust the position of the RFID badge.
Inventory
This is not immediately linked to the autostock functionality, but it is what the autostock works with and it is useful to get a good overview, for example after performing an autostock. On the Inventory tab you can view the inventory and scroll in the slot list.
Here you can resolve troubled slots and/or use other buttons explained in other guides to for example; removed RFIDs.
The inventory can for example look like this:
- Orange: Means that the slot is troubled. Can be resolved by clicking on the slot and then clicking the ‘Fix Troubled’ button.
- Light Blue: Means the slot has no RFID on it. It can be either NO_DATA or empty but it means the same thing.
- Red: Means the slot is disabled. Slot 1 should always be disabled and have no box as that is a drop slot. Meaning if the robot is unable to input a box into the correct slot. It can use slot Id 1 as backup to avoid the machine going offline. Other red slots should be only such slots that do not exist in the kiosk model you have.