In its broadest possible definition, a warehouse consists of a grouping of storage locations. The logical grouping of these storage locations is further broken down into a hierarchy of internal routing groups, storage location groups, and, at the bottom of the hierarchy, the locations. In parallel with this logical structure is one relating to working practices that breaks the locations down into work location groups within the warehouse.

Managing the movement of inventory within your warehouses is a matter of specifying internal routings, which define a sequence of movements from internal routing group to internal routing group. These internal routings are associated with transaction types and items within the warehouse.

You set up each warehousing elements—warehouses, internal routing groups, storage location groups, work location groups, locations, and internal routings—by setting values for a number of fields that control how that element operates within your inventory management system. For example, for each storage location group, you can define fields that control whether issue of stock from locations in the group is allowed, and whether receipt of stock into locations in the group is allowed.

Because the warehousing structure is in the form of a hierarchy, many of the fields are applied at more than one level in the structure.

For example, you can specify at the warehouse level whether locations in the warehouse are allowed to contain stock with mixed inventory status codes. The value you specify for the warehouse becomes the default setting for each storage location group within the warehouse. At the storage location group level, you can either accept the default from the warehouse level, or override it with a different setting.

Because you can have several related warehouses within a site, a level in the hierarchy exists above warehouse defined in Warehouse Control (4.1.24). The fields you set at this level do not control anything directly, but become defaults for each warehouse you set up. The highest level of all is Warehouse Management Control (4.24). However, the system control fields relate to overall use of the system, and do not provide defaults lower down the hierarchy.

The most efficient way to set up your warehousing elements, therefore, is to start at the top of the hierarchy and work down. In this way, you only need to enter exceptions to the general field settings at the lower levels.

Use of both Warehouse Management Control and Warehouse Control is described in Control Settings; use of Warehouse Maintenance is described in Warehouse Maintenance.