Distributed Warehouse Control and Management System

Business Challenges:

One of the largest agricultural machinery manufacturing company in Europe needed to create 28 warehouse management system.

System Functionality

Subsystem must:

• Provide recording of stocks of materials and capital equipment flow at Rostselmash plant warehouses;
• First warehouse type - stock warehouse;
• Second warehouse type - spares and purchased components warehouse;
• Third warehouse type - department of finished products selling;
• Fourth warehouse type - instrument warehouse;
• The total number of warehouses - 28;
• Information about the actual state of remains and stocks of materials and capital equipment flow in warehouses must be accessible for warehousing management accounts department, plant provision department and plant management services;
• System must provide recording of materials and capital equipment flow supply both from external suppliers and own workshops;
• Recording in the material and instrument warehouses must be kept according to stock-list numbers;
• Recording in the spares and purchased components warehouse must be kept according to drawing numbers from the point of view of suppliers and from the point of view of country-supplier for the export delivery;
• Recording in the department of finished products selling must be kept separately for receipt (this recording must be kept according to drawing numbers) and withdrawal (the recording must be kept according to loading place);
• Recording program in the department of finished products selling must provide issue of the shipped product integration state sheet;
• Issue the sheet of stocks of materials and capital equipment remains on inquiry date, the sheet of supply from the beginning of a month from the point of view of suppliers, the issue of withdrawal from the warehouse according to receivers, the sheet of remains using prices of the last delivery;
• Transfer receipt and withdrawal warehouse documents to the accounting subsystem of the plant in the electronic representation;
• Keep records using average prices but store information on material acquisition prices from suppliers.
• Application must provide response on any query within 2 seconds;
• Application must work in Windows operating system environment, version 98 and higher;
• Applications are to be developed using Builder C++ 5.0 visual programming environment;
• Database must be stored using Oracle 8i database management system ;
• The existing intraplant telephone network will be used as the communication link for data transferring;

Used languages & Technologies

• Due to comparatively small volume of stored information (according to our estimation there will be stored no more than 10 millions records in the warehouse operation table within 5 years) and the Customer requirements to the used hardware we decided to use double-link client-server architecture. It is supposed that servers will process the most difficult part of the business-logic and workstations will be responsible for data representation to a user.
• All business-logic of a server will be implemented with the help of View, Stored procedures & Triggers.
• The PL/SQL DBMS Oracle 8i programming language will be used as the development tool for the server's business-logic.
• The visual programming environment Builder C++ 5.0 will be used as the development tool for applications used at users workstations. The visual programming environment Builder C++ 5.0 supports developing of object-oriented programs using ANSI - compatible Ñ++ compiler. Programs are supposed to be developed using module approach, that is one function - one module. Each function corresponds to the usage variant represented on the Use-Case Diagram.