How should the central and branch warehouses be managed?
The central warehouse and the branch stores need to be tracked as separate stock locations.
Dispatches from the centre to a branch should be recorded.
How should transfers between branches work?
A product sent from one branch to another should be recorded as a transfer.
That way, which location it left and which location it reached both stay traceable.
How should branch counts be run?
Applying a similar counting standard across every branch is what produces comparable data.
Where product names, units of measure and counting methods differ, central assessment gets harder.
Should waste be tracked per branch?
It should.
Comparing waste ratios between branches makes operational differences far easier to see.
What data should central management see?
Depending on what is needed:
- current stock,
- warehouse movements,
- transfers,
- counts,
- waste,
- sales consumption
can all be tracked per branch.
Why do user permissions matter?
Not every user needs to work across every branch.
So the branches and the transactions a user can reach should be limited by role.
How should the ERP connection be handled?
Where an ERP is in use, which system holds the master record for which piece of stock data has to be settled.
Otherwise the two systems end up with different stock results.
In summary
In multi-branch inventory management, the point is not for each branch to develop its own method, but for one shared standard to be applied across all of them.
Kerzz