What is a location in CommTrack?
A location in CommTrack 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 CommTrack terminology, location, supply point, and sites all refer to the same thing.
What is the role of a location in CommTrack?
It is the heart of a CommTrack 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 CommTrack 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 CommTrack project?
A location needs to:
1. Have its hierarchy setup so that:
- things won't get messed up when there are two locations of same names in different districts
- 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 Types.
There are two ways to register locations in CommTrack:
- Manual creation of location. This works better if there are fewer than 10 locations reporting to your CommTrack 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 Setup/Locations, hit "New Location at state level" and create a new location at top level. Return to previous page and click on the plus sign to the left of the newly created top-level location. Repeat the practice until you create the lowest-level location. Geographic coordinates for lowest-level location is necessary for CommTrack map reports to have outputs.
Default location hierarchy has five types of location.
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 Setup and select Locations. Go click 'Bulk Import Locations', and download the location configuration file.
In this example we updated the default location hierarchy from five to two levels. Accordingly in the excel file there would be two sheets: sheet1 for District information and sheet2 for Clinic information.
Let's say the 6 facilities are equally distributed from district a to district c. Fill the 'name' column, save the file and upload. The system would automatically generate an id for each district.
Once you have successfully uploaded the excel file, repeat the download step and open the downloaded excel file. You should be able to see 3 ids for each district type. This time you would work on clinic sheet.
The concept for uploading clinic information is the same: fill in 'name' column with name of facilities. Two more manual steps: 1) fill in 'parent_id' column with district id. Let's say clinic 5 and clinic 6 are located in district a (a.k.a. district a is the parent of the two clinics). Then the parent id for these two clinics should be the system-generated id for district a in sheet district. 2) fill in 'site_code' column with unique codes for each clinic.
Save the excel file and upload it again on the same screen. Once it is successfully uploaded, select 'Manage Locations' and you should be able to see the three districts and clinics within each district. You need to manually fill in all parent id for all clinics even when there are more than hundreds of them.
