Improve the Materials Tracking Capabilities of Your ERP System

All ERP systems are accounting systems at heart. As such, they track the quantity of each Item Master part number in stock. Many ERP systems improve on this by tracking the quantity at each location and some will even keep a list of quantities by lot number at a location.

From an accounting viewpoint this is more than adequate but often falls short of the requirements for tracking materials in an industrial distribution warehouse, manufacturing plant, or industrial supply chain.

The primary reason for this is that ERP systems are tracking the quantity of materials at a location rather than tracking the location of containers of material and/or individual serialized items, which is the method used by Amazon, UPS, and FedEx and is now the GS1 standard for tracking materials in the Global Supply Chain.

In this white paper, Dr. Green first gives a brief overview of container-based tracking and then looks at the problems caused by tracking items by location rather than tracking containers and serialized items. Then he looks at how to integrate container-based tracking into existing (or new) ERP and accounting systems.

To learn more about this, please read the whitepaper "Improve the Materials Tracking Capabilities of Your ERP System" by Dr. Peter Green.