⚙️
🌟 Najlepsze dopasowanie
Wpisz szukaną frazę, aby zobaczyć propozycje AI.

Material management vs. warehouse management. The impact of IT on logistics – part 11

September 27, 2004 | Adalbert

 

The impact of IT on logistics – part 11

Over the past dozen or so years, computerization has entered enterprises in leaps and bounds, and today it is difficult to imagine an efficiently functioning enterprise without appropriate IT infrastructure. Most of the IT systems offered on the market designed to support enterprise management cover almost all areas of enterprise activity, including the management of raw materials and finished products. In IT systems of Western origin, the concept of material is strongly generalized, encompassing raw materials, semi-finished products, structural elements, as well as final products. For this reason, almost any IT system that has been assigned the label of integrated will also cover so-called material management.

Some authors unfortunately equate material management with warehouse management, rightly recognizing that materials are generally located in warehouses. In this context, they assume that the primary advantages of material management systems (commonly understood as MMS) lie in the ability to generate a series of warehouse receipts documenting changes in inventory status.

Just as physical changes in status are recorded on the basis of issue documents (GI – Goods Issue), receipt documents (GR – Goods Receipt) or transfers (IM – Inventory Movement), valuable status changes are carried out through:

  • invoices
  • simplified bills
  • receipts
  • correction invoices and bills

In this understanding, software defined as warehouse management, in addition to inventory record-keeping and generating warehouse documents, additionally performs the following functions:

  • generating tabular reports based on information contained in the database (e.g., sales report for a given period, purchase report from a given recipient, etc.)
  • record-keeping of payments associated with warehouse documents
  • exporting data to accounting programs, etc.

The number and usefulness of these reports is unfortunately still one of the main criteria that influence the overall assessment of warehouse software functionality. The usefulness of material management systems (equated, as I mentioned, with warehouse management) is reduced to recording inventory statuses in the form of an aggregated number of individual goods placed in the warehouse, by executing supply and material issue transactions on paper documents and “throwing them into the computer.” The above definition very often defines the primary task of a warehouse system.

On the other hand, modernly understood logistics strives to diminish the purposefulness of inventory storage, recognizing that this is a predominantly cost-generating process. Unjustified overloading and moving of pallets from place to place adds no added value from the perspective of the customer, who has no desire to pay a single cent (or euro) more for goods just because they are stored in a warehouse, even a very modern one.

What then is the difference between systems equipped with IT modules designated as MM and WM?

The most important feature distinguishing IT systems supporting material management from IT systems supporting warehouse management is that in material management, inventories of individual material items are managed, while in warehouse management, inventories of logistic units located in specific warehouse locations are managed.

P05-11.pdf