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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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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Overview of Warehouse Processes
The basic function of a warehouse is to store goods. This means that they receive deliveries from suppliers, do any necessary checking and sorting, store the materials until it is dispatched to customers. Traditionally warehouses were seen as places for the long-term storage of goods. Now organizations want to optimize their customer experience and try to move materials quickly through the supply chain, so the role of warehousing has changed.
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Warehouses may seem like a simple, straightforward concept, but they actually include a variety of different types of warehouses that all have their own niche. The type of warehousing that’s right for you depends on your specific industry, location, and needs. From private warehousing, distribution centers, and climate-controlled warehouses, there’s an option to suit every business.
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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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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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Inventory is money, and hence businesses need to perform physical inventory counts periodically to make sure that their inventory records are accurate. The traditional approach to conducting inventory counts is to shut down a facility during a slow time of year to count everything, one item at a time. This process is slow, expensive, and (unfortunately) not very accurate.
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One of the warehousing best practices that retailers like Walmart, Amazon, and Target have adopted is known as cross-docking. During this process the inbound products are unloaded at a distribution center and then sorted by destination, and eventually reloaded onto outbound trucks. In real parlance, the goods are not at all warehoused but just moved across the dock (hence the name).
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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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Transport operations are often divided into full load and part load and due to economies of scale, the unit costs are higher for part loads. Our customer needs several part loads delivering, so it can reduce costs by consolidating these into full loads. Then it gets all the part loads delivered to a warehouse near the suppliers, consolidates them into full loads, and pays the lower costs of full-load transport to its operations.
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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.
