Introducing Warehouses
A warehouse consists of a group of storage locations. These can constitute a single building, but this is not necessary. A warehouse could be part of a larger building, or, for storage of material such as construction materials, the storage locations could be in the open air. A single warehouse could actually consist of a number of separate buildings. To define it as a warehouse, you identify the storage locations that you want to group together and manage in the same way.
Because system software does not have to be aware of all the workings within the warehouse, each warehouse is defined as a standard location. This approach lets you keep all the internal warehouse operations separate from other system activities. When you want to send inventory into a warehouse, as far as system software is concerned, you are simply putting it in a location. However, when that location is also identified as a warehouse, all the warehousing functions become available within it.
From system software’s point of view, you receive inventory into a location such as WHSE01, which is associated with a site. However, because this is a warehouse, the inventory does not actually stay in that location. The location is used as a gateway into the actual storage locations that exist within the warehouse.
Eventually, the inventory is put away in one or more storage locations within the warehouse. These are real locations, not placeholders. Each of these locations is defined in the same way as other locations, so the inventory is again recognized by the system as residing in a known location in a known site. The system selects locations for inventory.
In order for QAD Warehousing to put your inventory away in the way you require, you must define the characteristics of your warehouses. This involves setting up a range of fields that control the inventory management processes, and also defining the way that the storage locations within each warehouse are grouped.
The main groupings of locations within a warehouse are:
• Internal routing groups
• Storage location groups
• Work location groups
Note: Locations are unique to a site. Because of this, two locations in two different warehouses but at the same site cannot have the same name.
As explained, items are received in a location representing a warehouse. The inventory status of this location should be non-available but nettable. Even though the inventory does not remain for long in that warehouse location, the non-available status prevents the picking process from looking there.