Warehouse Master Data

In Items - Warehousing, you define and maintain warehousing-specific data for all items used in Warehousing. This data is required for all activities involved in warehouse processing. In Warehouse - Item, you can define item data for specific warehouses.

In Warehousing, you can use serial numbers to track serialized items through receipts, transfers, storage, or issues, the latter of which is mandatory. You can also track serialized items back to their source. The source of a serialized item is, for example, the purchase order or the production order that caused the receipt of the serialized item, or the sales order or the work order that caused the issue of the serialized item.

The need to track items by means of serial numbers mainly arises from the items' cost. The more expensive the item, the more closely you want to monitor the item during its life cycle.

In general, expensive items are produced and handled in relatively low quantities, whereas the goods flow of less expensive items involves higher quantities. In LN, this concept is modeled in the low volume and the high volume scenarios that provide various options to register serialized items.

Lot and serial registration templates are used to specify the order origins and transaction types for which serial and/or lot registration must take place. This applies to lot and serial numbers that are not registered in inventory but registered during issue or during both receipt and issue.

Lot control (not in inventory) is a special type of lot control intended for high-volume, low-value items. If you apply lot control (not in inventory) for a particular item, LN does not record the inventory for each combination of lot and warehouse, and location. You can still record information about each lot, such as lot number, buy-from business partner, manufacturer, and certificate number. This information is used for quality assurance.

A configuration of items and their packaging. A package definition for an item can be, for example, a pallet that contains 12 boxes and each box contains 4 pieces. The package definition specifies how the items must be packed. If you use handling units, the package definition determines the handling unit structure and the packaging details for the handling units that are used to pack the items.

This constraint can be applied to the material quantities and packing method that is received by customers. For example, car manufacturers frequently accept only full packaging material, such as crates, boxes and pallets. At each packaging level in a packaging structure, you can specify whether full packaging is applicable for all the levels within the packaging structure or only for specific levels.

Shipping material accounts are used to register packaging items issued and received per address, for the purpose of communicating with business partners about the quantities of packaging items and their payments and to monitor packaging material balances.

Replenishment matrices are used to automatically control the quantity of items on pick locations. Based on a replenishment matrix, you can automatically generate warehouse orders to replenish pick locations, and also directly process the orders. Replenishment matrices are defined by linking pick locations to bulk locations.

The warehouse is the place where all received goods are stored originating from purchase, production, and so on. These goods are retrieved from the warehouse later on for production, sales, service, or transport to another warehouse. You can optionally divide a warehouse into locations or zones.

Locations are the sections of the warehouse where items are actually stored. Locations can optionally be assigned directly to an item or item group, or by means of storage conditions. Note that the use of locations within a warehouse is not mandatory. Locations can have the following types:

A zone is a part of the warehouse that can be assigned to specific employees or vehicles. Each location can be assigned to a zone. Locations that work with other locations or locations with identical or similar purposes can be grouped into zones.

A warehousing procedure includes various steps called activities that control the processing of warehousing orders or handling units.

A code that identifies the type of a warehousing order. Warehousing order types are classified by inventory transaction type. The inventory transaction type that you add to a warehousing order type determines the type of warehousing procedure(s) that you can link to the warehousing order type. The default warehousing procedure that you link to a warehousing order type determines how the warehousing orders or handling units to which the order type is allocated are processed in the warehouse, although you can modify the default procedure for individual warehousing orders or order lines.

An Assembly kit is an order-dependent set of items that must be supplied together to the shop-floor warehouse. To specify the items that must be part of an assembly kit, you must link the assembly kit to a warehouse and item combination. You can only use assembly kits if the supply method for the warehouse and item combination is order controlled/SILS.

LN provides various forecast methods, which you can finetune to meet your organization's requirements.

A method to calculate the inventory value. The inventory is valued at either its fixed price or its actual receipt price. Because the inventory value can change with time, the age of the inventory must be recorded. The following inventory valuation methods are available:

You can use label layout and printing to create and maintain labels for different purposes related to different processes in LN.

You can use storage conditions to avoid the storage of items at unsuitable locations.

You can set parameters for integration with the Infor Warehouse Management System or any other Warehouse Management System (WMS).