Warehouse management
What is physically where, and every movement that put it there.
01 What it holds
The data inside it
Stock by location down to bin level, receipts, picks, packs, dispatches and the labour consumed doing them.
Stock item, Location / Bin, Receipt, Pick task, Pack, Shipment, Cycle count, Adjustment
02 Getting the data out
Extraction, and the keys that decide whether it joins
APIs or database extraction per site, often per warehouse instance. High transaction volume and short retention are common, so history has to be captured continuously rather than queried later.
Item identifiers usually match the ERP article master, but unit of measure does not: cases, pallets and eaches convert through factors that change by supplier and over time.
03 What goes wrong
The failures that look like success
Each of these produces a number that is plausible, reconciles to something, and is wrong. They are worth reading before the first extract, not after the first dispute.
Unit of measure conversions
The most common quiet error in supply chain analysis. A pallet counted as an each produces stock figures that are wrong by orders of magnitude.
Stock on hand is a moment, not a period
Balances are snapshots. Averages need either periodic snapshots kept deliberately or movement replay, and most estates keep neither.
Adjustments hide four different problems
Damage, theft, miscount and process error all post as adjustments; without a reason code the shrink number cannot be acted on.
Short retention
Many WMS instances purge transactional detail within months, so a question asked in January about last spring has no data behind it.
04 Joins that matter
What this system is worth joining to
| Join to | What it lets you answer |
|---|---|
| ERP | stock valuation and the article master |
| TMS | dispatch to freight cost and delivery performance |
| POS or e-commerce | availability against actual demand |
05 Metrics it feeds
The numbers that come out of it
06 Questions
Frequently asked
Why keep WMS history if the ERP has stock?
Because ERP holds the valuation and WMS holds the behaviour. Pick accuracy, replenishment timing and location-level availability only exist here, and they explain service failures that the ERP can only report after the fact.
What is the first thing to standardise across sites?
Unit of measure and adjustment reason codes. Without those two, multi-site comparison is not possible regardless of how good the platform is.
Connect this system without replacing it
SCIKIQ reads it in place, resolves the entities inside it and governs what the fields mean.