Guided journey
2- Setup Your Warehouse
Turn an empty database into a working warehouse: how stock is stored, how it moves, how it gets replaced, and how the numbers stay honest.
A warehouse in WindoorERP is not a setting, it is a model: the site, the locations inside it, the operations that move goods between them, and the rules that bring material back when it runs out. Get the model right once and every receipt, delivery and stock figure after it lands where you expect. Get it wrong and you will spend months correcting quantities by hand.
This path follows the order a warehouse is really built. First how stock is stored: company, site, location, and the lot or serial number below it. Then how it moves: operation types, the backorder policy, transfers, and the difference between what you expected and what actually happened. Then how it gets replaced: routes, ordering per job, the replenishment screen and reordering rules. It ends where every implementation ends, counting real material onto the shelves and walking one job through the whole chain before you trust it.
Watch the full demo
One recording of this entire journey, start to finish — it covers every step below, and walks through worked examples that the individual articles do not each show on their own.
By the end you will be able to
- Explain the four levels stock is grouped on, and what every single movement records
- Create a warehouse, its locations and its putaway rules, and give it a short code you will still be happy to read in two years
- Decide whether goods arrive and leave in one step or several, and set that per warehouse
- Decide which material is traced by lot or serial number, and what that costs on every receipt
- Configure an operation type, and set the backorder policy before the first short delivery rather than after it
- Run a receipt and a delivery end to end, and read the operations and the detailed operations behind them
- Read the forecast, the moves history and the moves analysis, and know which answers which question
- Choose how each family of material gets replaced: by hand, by reordering rule, or per job
- Count your existing stock onto the shelves, and keep it honest with cycle counts
Before you start
- Administrator rights, or the Inventory manager access group
- The Inventory app installed, and its essential settings reviewed with you
- The physical layout of the site to hand: the areas you store material in, and who works in each
- Time on the floor with whoever actually receives and issues material — this is not a desk-only setup
- Somebody from purchasing available for the replenishment steps, because those end in real requests for quotation
The path
02
How stock is stored
- 02 Understand warehouses, locations, and stock Before you create anything, learn the four levels stock is grouped on — company, warehouse, location, and the lot or serial number below it — and the single sentence every movement obeys: a source, a destination, and nothing created or destroyed in between. 6 min Understand warehouses, locations, and stock
- 03 Set up a warehouse Create the site itself: a name, a short code you will be reading on every transfer for years, and an address. This is also where you give the honest answer to how many warehouses you have — a separate building with its own people, not a second room down the corridor. 5 min Set up a warehouse
- 04 Choose how goods come in and go out Decide how many stops goods make on the way in and on the way out. One step is a receipt that puts material straight on the rack; two or three model a goods-in bay and an inspection somebody genuinely performs. Model only the stops that exist in your yard. 5 min Choose how goods come in and go out
- 05 Create storage locations Name the places inside the site: the profile racks, the glass stillages, the finished-goods bay. Keep it shallow at first — two zones people maintain beat twenty racks nobody updates, and you can always go deeper later. 11 min Create storage locations
- 06 Send arriving goods to the right shelf A putaway rule sends arriving material to its own place without anyone thinking about it: aluminium to the profile racks, glass to the stillages, hardware to the shelves. Set them once and receiving stops being a decision. 9 min Send arriving goods to the right shelf
- 07 Track material by lot or serial number Decide what has to be traceable piece by piece. Finished windows already carry a serial number from production; the question here is which purchased material — glass units, powder coat, sealant — earns a lot number of its own, and what that costs the storeman on every single receipt. 9 min Track material by lot or serial number
- 08 Set up product attributes for profiles, colours, and glass Profiles, colours and glass thicknesses are attributes of a product, not a hundred products typed out by hand. Setting them up now is what stops the catalogue — and the racks — filling with near-duplicates nobody can tell apart. 4 min Set up product attributes for profiles, colours, and glass
03
How stock moves
- 09 How inventory transactions fit together Everything from here is one idea: material moves between two locations, and every screen is a different way of asking for that. A receipt, a delivery, an internal transfer and a count correction are the same record with different ends on it. The operation type is the to-do list a movement belongs to, the transfer is one trip, the operations inside it are the products, and behind those sit the exact lots and shelves that were used. 3 min
- 10 Configure an operation type Operation types are the to-do lists your team works from — Receipts, Delivery Orders, internal transfers — and each carries the defaults every transfer of that kind is born with: where it takes goods from, where it puts them, how it is numbered, when it reserves, and what it does with a shortfall. 5 min Configure an operation type
- 11 Decide what happens when a transfer moves less than was ordered A supplier short-ships, a van leaves half loaded: the policy you set here decides whether the missing part survives as a second transfer or disappears without a trace. Set it per operation type before the first partial delivery — not after somebody asks where the rest of the order went. 7 min Decide what happens when a transfer moves less than was ordered
- 12 Receive and deliver in one step Run the flow end to end on the simplest configuration there is: find the receipt, correct what actually arrived, validate, and watch stock rise that same second. Then do the same with a delivery, and read what the transfer says about what you expected versus what moved. 7 min Receive and deliver in one step
- 13 Trace every movement of a product Two reports carry the whole trail. Moves History is one line per movement that actually happened; Moves Analysis is one line per movement that was planned, demand beside quantity. Learn which answers which question now, while the data is small enough to check by eye. 4 min Trace every movement of a product
- 14 Read the forecasted report The forecast is the screen that answers “can I promise this?”. It reads today's stock, the receipts on their way in and the orders pulling stock out, and shows what will be left. Learn to read the table before somebody asks you for a delivery date. 4 min Read the forecasted report
04
How stock gets replaced
- 15 Build a route with push and pull rules A route is the answer to “when this is needed, where does it come from”: bought, transferred from another site, or made. Routes are containers of rules, and the rules are what actually run — so read one before you build one. 13 min Build a route with push and pull rules
- 16 Order stock only when a job is sold Some material you never hold: it is ordered because a job was sold. Replenish on Order links a confirmed order straight to a purchase, which is exactly right for special glass and one-off hardware, and exactly wrong for the profiles you cut every day. 4 min Order stock only when a job is sold
- 17 Choose how stock gets replaced Now the standing question: how does material get back on the shelf? There are three answers — do it by hand from the replenishment screen, let a reordering rule do it, or order per job — and most fabricators need all three for different material. 4 min Choose how stock gets replaced
- 18 Work the replenishment report The replenishment screen is the manual version of a reordering rule, and it is where to start. It lists what the forecast says you are short of, lets you set the quantity, and turns the lot into requests for quotation in one press. 5 min Work the replenishment report
- 19 Set a reordering rule When you trust the numbers, automate them: a minimum, a maximum, and WindoorERP raises the request for quotation itself. Start with the material you never want to run out of — the profiles and gaskets every job eats — and leave the rest manual. 6 min Set a reordering rule
05
Go live
- 20 Adjust stock after a count Everything above is scaffolding until the numbers match the shelves. Count what is physically there and apply it, area by area, with the people who will have to live with the result. 5 min Adjust stock after a count
- 21 Schedule cycle counts by location A single count decays. Give each area a counting frequency so the system asks for the next one by itself, and the fast-moving racks get looked at more often than the slow ones. 4 min Schedule cycle counts by location
- 22 Walk one job end to end before you trust it Prove the whole chain on one product, with no shortcuts: create it, sell it, watch the delivery sit waiting for stock, replenish it, receive part of the purchase order and take the backorder, then deliver what you have and let the rest wait. It takes twenty minutes and it finds every setting you got wrong. 3 min
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