Creating new Warehouse Locations
Warehouse locations may be quickly created through the warehouse menu, and will be created in context of an existing warehouse. Each location created must be created within an area of a building, and the building exists in context of a place. This hierarchy allows TVA to ensure that work processes are operating in the proper site, and allows inventory and material at different sites to have a clearly distinct identification.
When creating a new warehouse location, the critical fields are a location identifier and the type of location. Additionally, as noted above, a place, building, and area, must be selected in order to proceed.
An example location creation screen is shown below.
In this example, we can see a new location named STORAGE001 is being created, and the type Storage is selected. All other fields for the attributes and characteristics are default, and optional for data entry.
The type of location is important, as the location type drives the use of the location across various warehouse functions. For example, a receiving location is used directly by the various receiving processes, while others are supporting material processing functions. A summary of location types is listed below.
- Storage - Provides storage for specific or arbitrary items, depending on the location configuration
- Receiving - Allows material to be received into the warehouse for processing
- Packing - Packing stations to create new packages, item manifests, and other functions
- Shipping - Shipping stations to gather packages onto outbound Shipments
- Pickup - A Pickup location to allow customers to directly retrieve orders from the warehouse
The location identifier does not need to meet any formal standard structure, aside form being alphanumeric, and the structure of the location identifier is up to an organization. Common identifier schemes may encode area, row, shelf, and bin into an identifier, such as A1R2S3B4 for Area 1, Row 2, Shelf 3, and Bin 4, however TVA does not set a requirement on this. TVA does require that locations be uniquely identified, however, as material must be at a unique position within the facility.
When a location is created, the details will be presented and the location may be further reviewed.