Setting up a New Warehouse

When establishing a new Warehouse in TVA, you must first define the physical characteristics of the warehouse itself. This starts by using the Places module to create the relevant geographic boundary and definition.

Start by going to Places and create a new place covering the area of the warehouse, and potentially surrounding areas. The place should include processing and storage lots, parking and loading positions, and any other buildings and facilities relevant to the facility.

Once a Place has been created, now create the Building that houses the warehouse facility. The building does not need to have a geographic boundary defined, however it is helpful to visualize the buiding boundary on the map.

After a Building has been created, the Warehouse Areas must subsequently be created. The Warehouse only needs one area, however often it is useful to distinguish between different regions of the warehouse. For example, it is not uncommon to have an area for material processing, a separate area for storage, and even an area for secured storage. Note that the Area is not the same as locations, which will be established soon.

With the Place, Building, and Area(s) created, the warehouse locations must be established.

Locations

In TVA, a location has a designated type or purpose, and this drives many functions in the system. Some of the essential types of locations required in TVA, in each Warehouse, are:

• Storage
• Receiving
• Packing
• Shipping
• Pickup (Optional)

Under the Warehouse menu, the Create Locations menu option can be used to create the necessary locations in the system for the warehouse. Without all essential location types established, TVA will be unable to perform general warehouse management functions.

Note that not all warehouses support a pick up process, where customers may directly retrieve orders from the facility. If this is not supported, the Pick Up location is not required.

For storage locations, the specific characteritics are essential for planning the proper storage of material. A storage location can be open stow, allowing all material to potentially be stored in the location, restricted stow allowing only the designated items, or no stow, where TVA will not automatically put material in the position.

Generally warehouses have many locations on various rows, shelves, and bins, and creating these manually via the web interface would be a tedious process. Using the Location Creation template, a set of locations may be created and imported quickly, speeding the data creation process.

Inventory

In a new warehouse, there may or may not be established inventory on hand. If there is no inventory, material may simply be received in and stored in designated or calculated locations within the facility. However, if there is pre-existing inventory, it is recommended that the Inventory Import template be used to quickly populate the items and quantities at the various warehouse locations.

With an initial inventory established, general processes such as item receiving may be executed to test the configuration.

The inventory receiving process is detailed in the Inventory Receiving guide, however note that there are distinct processes for general item receiving, order receiving, and shipment receiving. For item receiving, arbitrary items may be received at a receiving location and ultimated stored via a stowing process. Inbound orders may be received, however only items on the order may be received. Finally, inbound shipments may be received based on the material on the shipment manifest.

Inventory Validation

The TVA software offers an ongoing inventory validation process which may be useful during a warehouse setup. For this, inventory review tickets may be used for assigning out the task of reviewing each location within the warehouse and determining if the material is at the proper location. Additionally, if the inventory has been tagged with an automation technology, such as RFID, the warehouse may be configured to automatically scan and verify the inventory with no manual intervention required.

Using the Inventory Summary report, a quick review of material on hand, and material that has been validated properly, may be generated to aid in the ongoing review and warehouse establishment proceses.