Warehousing is an important necessity in any ordered society which has a thriving economy. It is necessary because there has to be a place to store products which have left their place of manufacture but which have yet to find their shelf at a retailer. Thus a warehouse is a place of transition where products will stay for a short period before departing to their eventual local marketplace. The place where these products are stored during this interim period is a warehouse.
Within the last few years and decades warehousing has become much more mechanized and complicated as warehouses have tended to grow in size. The logistics of running a warehouse on a day-to-day basis are more complicated than ever, and computerized systems have latterly been used to help run these places, such is the complexity of the processes involved.
This has developed to the point where the industry has incorporated logistics into its overall recognized functionality, to the point where the world governing body of this industry is called the IFWLA, which stands for the International Federation of Warehousing and Logistics Associations, which is a joined-up network of national warehousing and logistics associations across the globe with regional centers in North America(the United States and Canada), the United Kingdom, Japan, China, and India, as well as other regional centers.
The IFWLA is effectively a massive, international business to a business network of people in the industry who strive to implement standards and codes of practice, with a healthy emphasis on the growth of knowledge and education within the industry’s core disciplines.
With computerization, the warehousing industry has greatly enhanced in terms of its stock control. Manually making a note of how much of what products were brought in and how much of what products were sent out of any given warehouse was a hit-and-miss chore and left a great deal of room for error. But with modern digital
This is also very useful because it can be used to detect trends, and so the expectation of a specific product may be met with greater manufacturing rates once an upward trend is spotted, which impinges on productivity and efficiency, and which also increases profits over the
The shelf life of certain categories of products largely determines how long a category of product can remain in storage before it is shipped to its market. This varies hugely. For example, timber and bricks can stay for months gathering dust in the warehouse of a builder’s merchant without any harm coming to them. But food is another matter altogether. The perishable nature of food and similar consumables means that they have to be moved their destination. This is all part of the increasingly complex role of warehousing and is the reason why it is such an important aspect of a modern smooth-running economy.
