Warehouse Management Overview
The Warehouse Management system handles many of the activities that are performed in your warehouse locations. These activities include inventory item creation (from existing catalog information) and maintenance, bin creation and maintenance, receiving goods from your vendors into your warehouse locations, and transferring items between warehouse locations. The Warehouse Management System also allows you to perform various other warehouse-related tasks.
Please Note: The WMS system is NOT used to ship out customer orders, it is NOT used to perform basic Product Management tasks, and it is NOT used to perform assembly operations Those business processes are performed using the Order Fulfillment, the Product Management, and the Shop Floor Systems. For more information about each of those systems, please refer to the appropriate section of the help documentation. For more information about inter-facility transfer processing (transferring inventory between remote locations), please see the documentation for the Purchasing System.
This section provides an overview of each of the primary business processes that are performed using the Warehouse Management System. These business processes, and the applications used to perform them are listed below and described in more detail in the following sections.
Inventory Management Used to view, create, and edit the Inventory Master records for each item in each warehouse location. Inventory Master records are used to define the items that can be processed in each of your inventory locations. Inventory Master records are created from Product Catalog records and you must have a Catalog record in the system for all items in the Inventory Master file. You may not process an item that is in the Catalog file until the item has been created in one or more inventory locations.
Bin Management Used to view, create, and edit the Bin records for each inventory item. Bin records are records that identify the physical locations and quantities where a specific inventory item is stored within a specific inventory location. One or more Bin records can be created and maintained for each Inventory Master record in each inventory location. The Bin Management programs allow you to create new bin records, edit existing bin records and transfer quantities between bins for the same item that are in the same warehouse location.
Inventory Adjustment The Inventory Adjustment program is used to adjust the on hand quantity of an inventory item in a specific inventory location and to charge the amount of the adjustment to the general ledger. The Inventory Adjustment program allows you to specify the item, bin, and quantity to be adjusted and the adjustment code to be used for the transaction.
Inventory Transfer Used to process immediate transfers of inventory quantities between warehouse locations. The Inventory Transfer program updates the inventory and bin quantities for the items being transferred and it does not allow the transfer of allocated or committed quantities.
Safety Stock Management The Safety Stock Management System allows you to reserve specific inventory items and quantities for allocation to specific customers. The records that are created and maintained in the SAFETY file (File 214) define the items and quantities that are reserved in each warehouse for each customer. The total of the safety stock quantity for each warehouse/item combination is also stored in the Inventory Master record for each item. If safety stock has been defined for a specific item, the system will not automatically allocate below the defined safety stock level for the item. When the on hand quantity of an item is not sufficient to fill the customer requirements from stock , and the order is a warehouse shipment (i.e. not a vendor shipment, or special order), the system backorders the sales order line for the item. If the customer for the order has safety stock available for the item, the Manual Allocation program can be used to allocate the safety stock to any backordered sales orders for the item.
Depreciating Stock The StreamV application allows you to automatically convert inventory on hand quantities from one item number to another. This option is used to automatically write down goods received via the return authorization system when the goods are not in salable condition (to handle open, damaged boxes, damaged items). The Depreciate Stock option can also be used to transfer in house items from a normal sku to another type of sku (such as damaged, open box, rebox) for the item. A Gencode table is used to classify the item types that are supported by your company and define the cost relationship between the normal and the depreciated versions of the item. The Table also determines the General Ledger account that the reduction in your inventory value will be charged to. Stock deprectiation is supported from the Inventory Management, from the RA Disposition, and from the Pending Management programs.
Converting Stock The Convert Stock option can be used to convert an in-house item quantity from one item to another existing item number.
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Inventory Transaction Processing