Warehousing

Warehousing
Warehouse staff must manage the receiving, shelving, inventorying, picking, and shipping of
goods. These responsibilities require the staff to be mobile. Warehouse operations traditionally
have been paper intensive and time consuming. An organization can eliminate paper, reduce
errors, and decrease the time necessary to move items in and out by giving each warehouse
employee a handheld computing device with a bar code scanner interfaced via a wireless network
to a warehouse inventory system.
Upon receiving an item for storage within the warehouse, a clerk can scan the item’s bar-coded
item number and enter other information from a small keypad into the database via the handheld
device. The system can respond with a location by printing a put-away label. A forklift  operator can then move the item to a storage place and account for the procedure by scanning
the item’s bar code. The inventory system keeps track of all transactions, making it very easy
to produce accurate inventory reports. In addition, the online interaction with a database will
identify mistakes immediately, enabling the operator to correct the mistake before it becomes a
problem.
As shipping orders enter the warehouse, the inventory system produces a list of the items and
their locations. A clerk can view this list from the database via a handheld device and locate
the items needed to assemble a shipment. As the clerk removes the items from the storage bins,
the database can be updated via the handheld device. All of these functions depend heavily on
wireless networks to maintain real-time access to data stored in a central database.