Pick from the nearest location

Once the candidate parcels of stock have been gathered, this strategy sorts them by the full path of the location each one sits in — the complete name, WH/Stock/Shelf 1 and not just Shelf 1 — in plain ascending text order, and the reservation then works down that list until the demand is covered. Because the path includes the parents, the parent names dominate: everything under WH/Stock/Aisle A is exhausted before anything under WH/Stock/Aisle B is touched, no matter which shelf is physically nearer the door.

The sort is textual, and that bites

Names are compared as text, character by character, not as numbers and not case-insensitively. The consequences are entirely predictable once you know it, and entirely surprising if you do not:

• Shelf 10 comes before Shelf 2, because 1 precedes 2. Pad your numbers — Shelf 02, Shelf 10 — and the order behaves.
• Capitals sort before lower case, so Zone B comes before Zone a. Pick one convention per warehouse and hold to it.
• A leading space, a hyphen or a slash in a name changes its position. Names are data here, not decoration.
• Renaming a location silently re-routes every future pick from it. The strategy holds no copy of the old order.

What happens inside one location

When several parcels sit in the same location, the tie is broken by the parcel record's own identifier, highest first — which in practice means the most recently created parcel is taken first. This is worth stating plainly because the intuitive assumption is the opposite: Closest Location does not fall back to FIFO within a location, and choosing it quietly abandons date-based rotation for the stock it governs. If rotation matters more than walking distance for a family of products, FIFO on its category is the right answer, not this.

One rule then overrides everything above. After the sort, parcels carrying a lot or serial number are promoted to the front of the list, whatever location they are in. Identified stock is always consumed before untracked stock of the same product.

Two claims from older Odoo documentation do not hold here and are worth retiring. The first is that Multi-Step Routes must be enabled for this strategy — it need not; the Locations menu is gated on Manage Multiple Stock Locations alone, and Multi-Step Routes governs routes and rules, which have nothing to do with removal order. The second is that Closest Location can only be applied at the location level; the product category offers it too, and takes priority when it does.

Today, no. There is one active internal location, WH/Stock, and no product category or location on this system sets a removal strategy at all — so everything reserves FIFO by default and Closest Location has nothing to sort. The strategy becomes meaningful the day stock is genuinely split across named sub-locations, which needs Manage Multiple Stock Locations granted and the sub-locations created and named. Ask for that as a change to how the warehouse is modelled, not as a switch: it changes reservation, putaway, counting and the columns on the picking sheet all at once.

Closest Location sends the picker to a far shelf — the sort is alphabetical on the full path. Either rename the locations into deliberate walking order, or accept the alphabet; there is no third setting.

Setting it changed nothing — the product's stock is in one location, or the reservation already existed. Check the on-hand split under Inventory › Reporting › Stock, and unreserve then re-check availability to re-apply the order.

There is no Locations menu — it needs Manage Multiple Stock Locations. Until that is granted, the category's Force Removal Strategy is the only place this strategy can be set.

Reporting › Locations is missing too — the same permission gates it. Use Inventory › Reporting › Stock to see what is on hand while multi-location is off.

A location setting is being ignored — the product's category has a Force Removal Strategy filled in, and that always wins. Clear it to hand the decision back to the location.