Inventory Locations

Inventory locations provide some basic warehouse management functionality within Plant Applications. Rather than creating a different production unit for each location in a warehouse, a single ‘Inventory Point’ production unit can be created and multiple inventory locations created instead. Thus, when a production event is created on an inventory point, it can be assigned one of those multiple inventory locations but still allow the standard reports to report on total inventory. Furthermore, if the material represented by the production event is moved around the warehouse the inventory location can just be updated in the production event record instead of creating new production events on different production units and the genealogy links between them.

A common application of inventory points in Plant Applications is for in-process inventory. In manufacturing a lot of production lines have inventory locations on the plant floor (as opposed to the warehouse). Often, raw material delivered to a line is allocated to one of these inventory locations. Furthermore, there may be Work-In-Progress (WIP) buffers on the plant floor that can be represented as inventory points. These intermediate products are stored in a variety of locations on the plant floor before being consumed by the next step in the process.

When a production unit is made an ‘Inventory Point’ or a ‘Staging Point’, the ‘Inventory Locations’ are enabled for the production unit. For example,

Inventory locations are unique by production unit and location code. All the other fields are optional. For example,

The main configuration table for inventory locations is:

The main data tables for inventory locations are:

The database structure is as follows: