A guide to warehousing

AKA Warehouse - building for storage

High tech - issues - issue

A warehouse is a commercial building for storage of goods.

Warehouses are used by manufacturers, importers, exporters, wholesalers, transport businesses, customs, etc. They are usually large plain buildings in industrial areas of cities and towns, often in the port area.. They come equipped with loading docks to load and unload, or sometimes loaded directly from railways, airports, or seaports. They also often have cranes and forklifts for moving goods, which are usually placed on ISO standard pallets.

Some warehouses are completely automatic, with no workers inside. The pallets and product are moved with a system of automated conveyors and automated storage and retrieval machines coordinated by programmable logic controllers and computers running logistics automation software. These systems are often installed in refrigerated warehouses where temperatures are very cold to keep the product from spoiling, and also where land is expensive, as automated storage systems can use vertical space efficiently. High bay storage areas are often more than 10 meters high, with some over 20 meters high.

The direction and tracking of materials in the warehouse is coordinated by WMS (Warehouse Management System), a database driven computer program. The WMS is used by logistics personnel to improve efficiency of the warehouse by directing putaways and maintain accurate inventory by recording warehouse transactions.

Traditional warehousing has been declining since the last decades of the 20th century with gradual introduction of Just In Time (JIT) techniques designed to improve return on investment of a business by reducing in process inventory. The JIT system promotes delivery of product directly from factory to the retail merchant, or from parts manufacturers directly to a large scale factory such as an automobile assembly plant, without the use of warehouses. However, in the gradual implementation of offshore outsourcing and offshoring in about the same time period, the distance between the manufacturer and the retailer (or the parts manufacturer and industrial plant) grew considerably in many domains, necessitating at least one warehouse per country or per region in any typical supply chain for a given range of products.

Often they are used by crime groups to store stolen stuff. Insurance fraud is a theme common for them on TV. As the owner can pretend they had more stock, and the premises are often unguarded.

Bonded warehouse, a warehouse established by the state, or by private enterprise, in which goods liable to duty are lodged until the duty upon them has been paid.

The term Warehouse District was used for several urban neighborhoods across the United States formerly gritty industrial areas but have since experienced gentrification. The warehouses contained within the neighborhoods have often been converted to trendy nightclubs or high priced apartments and condominiums.

Warehouse store: A retail location with a limited variety of merchandise sold in bulk at a discount to customers. This type of store is also referred to as a Big Box or Price Impact store because of the spartan, warehouse style of the interior and the low prices. These stores tend to feature black text on a yellow background in marketing and in decor. Many warehouse stores are operated by traditional grocery chains both as a way to attract lower income, value conscious consumers and to maximize their buying power in order to lower costs at their mainstream stores. A warehouse club is a retail store, usually selling a limited variety of merchandise, in which customers pay annual membership fees in order to shop. Recent developments in marketing have also led to the development of warehouse style retail stores with extremely high ceilings where decorative shelving is replaced by tall heavy duty industrial racks, with items ready for sale being placed in the bottom parts of racks and crated or palletized and wrapped inventory items being usually placed in the top parts. In this way same building is used both as a retail store and a warehouse.

Defense of Sihang Warehouse was a battle that marked the beginning of the end of the three month Battle of Shanghai in the opening phase of the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Camp Warehouse has been the operations centre for the multinational International Security Assistance Force located 10 kilometers east of Kabul. The camp has soldiers and equipment from dozens of countries. Part of Camp Warehouse is a German-sponsored ISAF military hospital.

A government warehouse is

A) warehouse owned or operated by a government, for such purposes as storage of goods that are passing through customs, storage of impounded property, or storage of supplies and equipment.

B)The Government Warehouse is a plot device used in movies, television series, and novels, a scenario used in role-playing games, and a belief of some conspiracy theorists. The concept is that there is a secret government warehouse where various items are stored of whose existence the government wants the general populace to remain ignorant.

The Great Northern Warehouse is a grade 2* listed former railway goods warehouse located in the centre of Manchester, England.

Warehouse Management Systems (WMS)

key part of supply chain and primarily control the movement and storage of materials within an operation and process of associated transactions. The systems also direct and optimizes stock put-away based on real-time information about the status of bin utilization. Having a WMS in place means you don't depend any more on people's experience, the system has the intelligence. Warehouse management systems utilize Auto ID Data Capture technology, such as barcode scanners, mobile computers, wireless LANs and potentially RFID to efficiently monitor the flow of products. Once data has been collected, there is either a batch synchronization with, or a real-time wireless transmission to a central database. The database can then provide useful reports about the status of goods in the warehouse.

A good WMS should have a flexible location system, utilize user defined parameters to direct warehouse tasks and use live documents to execute these tasks, have some built in level of integration with data collection devices. Many Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERP), or accounting package warehouse management systems include degrees of pure WMS functionality as a module within their application. Objective is to provide a method of automatically receiving inventory, processing orders, and handling returns all within a single overall application umbrella.
warehouse management system vendors
Sterling Commerce
ACCPAC
HighJump Software, a 3M company
IntelliTrack
Manhattan Associates
Oracle Corporation
RedPrairie
SAP AG

In German they are known as "Lagerhaltung"

In Spanish they are known as "Almacén"

In French "Entrepôt"

In Dutch "Magazijn"

In Italian Magazzino