Locations

Note: Locations have now been renamed organizations: see wiki here.

What is a location in CommCare Supply?

A location in CommCare Supply is where the major activities in the supply chain happen. It can be a supply point - for example, a pharmacy that procures medicines from regional warehouses and sells essential medicines to individual customers. It can be a warehouse that stores, distributes and delivers products to the end supply point. Alternatively speaking, it can be a static facility receiving commodity, but may also be a mobile unit dispensing commodities.

In CommCare Supply terminology, location, supply point, and sites all refer to the same thing.

What is the role of a location in CommCare Supply?

It is the heart of a CommCare Supply system. All information about each logistics activity are collected on the basis of the locations registered on HQ.

How many locations can I create and supervise in my CommCare Supply system?

There is no exact limit to the number of locations, but if you are using feature phones rather than Android phones, syncing the location fixture might be slower than you expect if there are a large number of locations.

How to set up locations for your CommCare Supply project?

A location needs to:

1. Have its hierarchy setup so that:

1. things won't get messed up when there are two locations of same names in different districts
2. when you visit stock activity by locations you could have an overview of all locations in the same district (i.e., when you do not need to dive in to details of each individual facility)

2. Be associated with products that are consumed

3. Be associated with a mobile user so that they could have someone to report stock activity data

IMPORTANT: Before you begin, make sure that you have completed Location/Organization Levels.

There are two ways to register locations in CommCare Supply:

Manual creation of location. This works better if there are fewer than 10 locations reporting to your CommCare Supply system
Bulk upload tool. This would be the one if you have >100 facilities to register.

(Note: You may want to create a phone number for each mobile worker if you want to test the SMS report interface later. )

Manual creation

Go to Users - Organization Structure, hit "New 'Location' at top level" and create a new location. Name the location at the top level and click, "Create Location." Hit "New Child Location" and fill out the relevant information until you've created all relevant locations for the necessary levels. Geographic coordinates for lowest-level locations are necessary for CommCare Supply map reports to have outputs.

Upload Locations from Excel

Assuming in your project there are 3 mobile workers and each of them manages the inventory of 2 facilities. The first thing to do is to bulk upload 6 clinics. To do this, you first go to Users and select Organization Structure. Go click 'Bulk Upload', and then download the organization structure.

In this example we updated the location hierarchy to what is pictured below. Each level in the hierarchy is represented by a tab in the download.

In the download, Site code is the unique identifier in each tab that differentiates locations from one another. It must be assigned to each level of location from top level to the bottom level. For each tab in the Locations.xlsx (except the first tab), parent_site_code is the site_code in the previous tab.

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Save the excel file and upload it. Once it is successfully uploaded, select 'Manage Locations' and you should be able to see the three districts and clinics within each district.

Archiving locations

Archiving locations is a way to remove inactive locations from users phones, reports, and active data. It is a completely reversible action. It does not delete any data from a project space, but rather it hides it from users so that it doesn't throw off data about active locations.

As supply chain projects grow and evolve, it's important to be able to adjust the number and organization of locations. This feature allows you to remove and re-aggregate facilities that report stock, as well as to reorganize the structure of the location hierarchy to allow you to group facilities differently.

You can archive a location by navigating to CommCare Supply's Setup tab, and selecting Locations from the dropdown menu. There you'll find your project's locationhierarchy. Next to each location, you have the ability to edit or archive a location.

When you archive a location the following will happen:

Archiving a location that has facilities or location groups below it (eg. archiving an entire region under which are districts, under which there are individual facilities), all locations beneath the archived location will also become archived
Mobile devices which have synced since archiving the location will no longer be able to report on that location, and the supply-point case associated with that location will be closed.
Mobile devices which have not synced to the server will still be able to report information about that location, even though it is archived.
Any archived location will be filtered out of CommCare Supply reports unless the user specifically selects that they be included in the search.
Archived location will no longer be included in the bulk excel download of locations.
Un-archiving the location will allow mobile users to once again report information about that location, it will reopen the supply-point case associated with any locations reporting stock, and these locations will once again automatically be included in the standard CommCare Supply report filters. All values will be the same as were last reported about that location.