What is the difference between Warehouse Management & Inventory Management?
The terms “inventory management” and “warehouse management” are sometimes mistakenly used interchangeably as they both deal with operations and products of industries. Despite their few similarities, there are many notable differences between warehouse and inventory management systems.
The terms “inventory management” and “warehouse management” are sometimes mistakenly used interchangeably as they both deal with operations and products of retail industry. Both inventory and warehouse management systems enable companies to use barcoding devices to track parts and products within the warehouse, monitor product levels, pick, pack, and ship items, manage various locations, receive orders into inventory, and perform cycle counts. Despite their few similarities, there are many notable differences between warehouse and inventory management systems.
- Inventory management is usually the first step taken before warehouse management.
- Inventory management deals with total amount of inventory in one specific location.
- Inventory management tracks transactions related to inventory and provide total amount of stock for each specific storage location.
- Inventory Management is about managing the stocks in the warehouse and ensuring that the proper flow of stocks is maintained in a supply chain through the order fulfillment process.
- Warehouse management focuses on managing the entire storage system within the warehouse
- Warehouse management tracks location of specific items in the warehouse
- WMS deals with production supply, sales and distribution, and quality management and integral to ongoing operations of the retail organization.
- The most significant difference between the two systems is the human factor.
- Inventory management focuses only on product or stock, warehouse management involves managing employees and shipping or freight personnel operating in the warehouse environment.
- Warehouse Management is about managing the whole facility in which the products are stored, including the workforce, the equipment, technology to be used, and the inventory itself.
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The Outbound process starts with routing the shipments. The Outbound execution process starts from the point when pick tasks are completed for an outbound shipment and ends at the point where the outbound packages are loaded into trailers. The Warehouse Outbound process includes managing and controlling outgoing materials starting from the download of orders through to the shipping of products from the warehouse.
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Resource Planning is the process of planning for expected workload and determining the number of resources required to complete each activity in the warehouse. There are many types of warehouse positions, and they also vary by the employer, the scale of operations and location. Discussed here are generic positions applicable to warehouse management processes.
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One of the most important decisions when running a warehouse is its layout. Warehouse layout defines the physical arrangement of storage racks, loading and unloading areas, equipment and other facility areas in the warehouse. A good layout aligned with the business needs could have a significant effect on the efficiency.
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After products have been received and passed a quality inspection, they need to be stored so that you can find them when you need them. This process is called putaway. The spot where you store a particular product is called a location. One section of a warehouse might have small locations for light items; another area may have large locations on the floor for heavy items.
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Types of Inventory Count Processes
While dealing with lots of inventory in a warehouse, lots of things can go wrong. Shipments may not have the right number of units in them, or they could get damaged somewhere along the supply chain. Discrepancies in the stock may arise as part of every inventory control, and need to be corrected immediately after the inventory control procedure has been finished.
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What is a Warehouse & why companies need them?
All organizations hold stocks. In virtually every supply chain, gaps exist between when something is produced and when a customer is ready to buy or receive it. Stocks occur at any point in the supply chain where the flow of materials is interrupted. This implies that products need to be stored during this period of gap.
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Types of Order Picking Methods in the Warehouse
There are many different types of picking in a warehouse and each one works as a customized solution for each business. Depending on the size of your warehouse and inventory, the manpower you have on hand, and the number of customer orders made each day, there may be certain methods that are more efficient for you than others.
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At a high level, the essential elements in a warehouse are an arrival bay, a storage area, a departure bay, a material handling system and an information management system. As part of the process for enabling a warehouse layout, you must define warehouse zone groups, and zones, location types, and locations.
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Miscellaneous Warehouse Processes
At the end of each inventory control, the Contractor provides the Ordering Person with an inventory report which contains a list of all stock adjustments. The Ordering Person uses the report to create, by use of his/her own means, necessary value and accounting adjustments related to the stock. Let us look at some to the mislaneous warehouse processes not covered earlier.
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What is the difference between Warehouse Management & Inventory Management?
The terms “inventory management” and “warehouse management” are sometimes mistakenly used interchangeably as they both deal with operations and products of industries. Despite their few similarities, there are many notable differences between warehouse and inventory management systems.
