I have been giving a lot of thought recently to how we should implement warehouse management. Just using row/bay/bin is too restrictive.
If we have a warehouse structured like this :
it will not fit well to a rigid system of warehouse management.
What I propose a system where we have just one table for areas that can contain stock items. The best name would be "Locations" but that has already been taken, so I will for the moment call them "Containers". All containers can have parent containers. The above warehouse now looks like this:
As you can see the warehouse now can be modeled as a tree diagram. Each container can be set as to whether it can contain items, or just act as a container for child containers.
Each container has details of its physical position in the warehouse, and it's size. Also properties as to what it can contain (refrigeration unit for instance). Whether the contents are liquid etc.
Starting to implement this is easy, as each warehouse can be defined as a container. We just need a new table to hold the container information.
If we have a warehouse structured like this :
it will not fit well to a rigid system of warehouse management.
What I propose a system where we have just one table for areas that can contain stock items. The best name would be "Locations" but that has already been taken, so I will for the moment call them "Containers". All containers can have parent containers. The above warehouse now looks like this:
As you can see the warehouse now can be modeled as a tree diagram. Each container can be set as to whether it can contain items, or just act as a container for child containers.
Each container has details of its physical position in the warehouse, and it's size. Also properties as to what it can contain (refrigeration unit for instance). Whether the contents are liquid etc.
Starting to implement this is easy, as each warehouse can be defined as a container. We just need a new table to hold the container information.
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