CHAPTER ONE
1.0 INTRODUCTION
The functions of warehouse management is to provide cost effective storage, in a suitable condition for the organization’s products and materials to enhance effective rendering of customer services. The existence of a warehouse is justified by the extend to which it contributes to the efficiency and effectiveness of physical distribution functions.
The geographical location of a warehousing operation should be determined by production sites and the physical position of target markets. However, in some developing countries as Nigeria, political conditions have some times over ride economic arguments and facilities such as warehouse, go downs, assembly areas and buying points for the government organization have been sub-optimally sited. Warehouse managers have a number of important challenges which include, determination of most appropriate unit loads optimizing space utilization, reducing the movement of labour, equipment and product/materials to minimum, establishing a safe, secure warehousing environment and keeping cost to minimum.
1.1 GENERAL OVERVIEW
An earlier resource pack described the decisions that must be taken when a company organizes a channel or network of intermediaries who take responsibility for the management of goods as they move from the producer to the consumer. According to Piasacki (1978), initially a system to control movement and storage of warehouse management system (WMS) is expanding to including light manufacturing, transportation management, order management and complete accounting system. To use the grand father of operation, material requirement planning, (MRP) as a comparison, material requirement. Planning started as a manufacturing environment. What is clear is that the expansion of the over lap in functionality between warehouse management system and other functional area in physical distribution of goods from the producer to the consumer. Even through warehouse management contributes to gain added functionality, the initial core functionality of a ware house management system has not changed. The primary purpose of a warehouse management system is to control the movement and storage of material within an operation and process the associated transactions. The detailed set up and processing within a warehouse management system in my area of case study Unilever Nigeria Plc Aba, varies significantly from one material render to another, however the basic logic will use a combination of item, location quantity, unit of measure and order information to determine where to stock, where to pick and in what sequence to perform these operations.