Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Computer System for Warehouse with Captive Stores

This option of MIB was written in 1985 for a Midwest warehouse that has 23 captive stores. It was meant to be a simple inexpensive system and it continues to be that even today. I doubt that they spend $100 per store per year for support and hardware maintenance. Here a captive store means that the warehouse owns the stores. Each of the stores and the warehouse has their own computer. The stores are responsible for invoicing, received on accounts and reconciling the finish day reports with the daily deposits. The warehouse is responsible for daily stock orders, pricing the inventory, tracking interstore transfers, authorizing charge customers and mailing charge statements.

Interstore transfers are an important part of this business for a couple of reasons. First, the trucks delivering the daily stock orders travel the same route making the deliveries and on the return home. This means that a truck can pick up a part at one store and deliver it to another for minimal cost. This allows these stores in rural areas, in most cases, to have a needed part within a few hours rather than over night. Second, slow moving parts are kept in stores rather than in the warehouse. Thus, there is some chance that it can be sold directly from the store but for sure it can be moved from one store to another in at most one day and most of the time within a few hours.

The routine for daily stock orders is a two step process.

Step 1. The warehouse manager connects to the stores one at a time. He first down loads a file with any interstore transfers. He then has the store computer run a stock order. These two steps take a few seconds. He then disconnects from the store and connects to the next store and repeats the same steps.
Step 2. After he has connected to all of the stores, the manager starts connecting to the stores again one at a time. He down loads the store stock order into the warehouse computer and immediately prints an invoice for the stock order. Once the invoice is printed, the system creates a posting file for the store. The posting file and any interstore transfers from Step 1 are posted into the store. This completes the computer part of the daily stock order.

I was amazed that the warehouse manager posts the order to the store before the stock is pulled. However, the manager assured me that it is rare that when the computer says that they have a part, that they don't have it. Even then most of the time the error was because the part was put on the wrong shelf when it was originally delivered from the manufacturer. The error is usually corrected within hours and the part is delivered to the store the following day.

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posted by MIB @ 12:06 PM