IT systems used in areas related to inventory can be divided into: analytical, recording, and analytical-recording systems.
The group of analytical systems includes all individually developed spreadsheet scripts or other specially prepared dedicated software. This is not a very large group on the IT market and is generally not associated with the standard understanding of systems supporting warehouse management. Systems belonging to this group, due to the individualism of IT solutions, are treated as unique individual solutions. Inventory management functions implemented in dedicated IT solutions of this group enable the conduct of sophisticated analyses of inventory levels and replenishment, taking into account algorithms that are special at a given moment.
The group of recording systems includes IT systems that have the features of repeatable solutions supporting broadly understood warehouse management, sometimes wrongly associated with materials management. This is a very large group in the market offer, covering all kinds of systems of smaller or larger format in terms of offered functionality, created and developed over the last several decades from the DOS era to today’s more elegant WINDOWS era solutions (in fact, apart from the external shell, possessing very similar substantive functionality).
Intermediate solutions are IT systems that handle inventory issues somewhat “incidentally”. They belong to the group of analytical-recording systems, which generally include integrated IT systems containing separate or distributed modules responsible for analytics, recording, statistics, and inventory forecasting.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 1/2003.