Inventory, supply chain, procurement management and computer science - general, high-level question
I would like to ask a fairly general, high-level introductory question regarding inventory management.
So I was wondering if anyone on SO has any experience / knowledge or worked in the past in inventory, supply chain, procurement management settings. What typical problems or problems can be found in this area and how computer science, mainly algorithms, data structures and optimization can be used to solve such problems / problems?
Could this be related to operational research, queuing theory, etc.? I am not directly related to this area, but I need to know how CS is applied in these domains.
An internet search gives some vague results, so I would greatly appreciate any prior knowledge, educated advice, specific online resources, or even examples. Hopefully it will be good to ask such a lofty question here.
Thank you very much in advance
source to share
I have experience with warehouse management systems. Most of them are not very difficult from a CS point of view, but there are some juicy optimization problems where CS can be applied. For example, in order to reduce the time spent on "picking" an order (going through the warehouse and collecting the goods for the order), it is desirable to find the shortest path to all the places in the warehouse, which boils down to the "Traveling Salesman Problem".
Another place where CS applies is inventory; there are some very clever software products (eg INVENT Xpert) that allow random sampling of inventory collections to achieve the accuracy required by law; this means that instead of going to all storage locations and counting the amount stored there, only a small percentage (5-10%) of locations are actually counted.
source to share
This is a very general question. You probably need knowledge in distributed computing (depending on how big your operation is), database replication, some knowledge in traveling agents, problems and who knows better than you - what else - it very much depends on the problem you need to solve ...
I think you should explain the purpose of the question - so we can narrow down the answer to something that might be helpful ...
there are also a lot of off-the-shelf products (this requires a lot of customization, but they most require what you need in this field).
source to share
"What are the typical problems ..."
It is very common for multiple sites / terminals to update a particular row / record of the database at the same time, so you have to be absolutely bulletproof in locking and updating rows / records or you will lose money and customers. Database concurrency issues are important and your fault tolerant systems should be up and running.
Real load test. If you expect to have 50,000 different widgets in your warehouse, and you expect to have days (the day after Thanksgiving) when you get 6,000 hits per second for 9 hours on a particular widget, then what you are testing is real data and the real volume, as well as at the end of your tests, the quantity of your goods, turnover and reverse order cannot be disabled even by one.
Make sure you address these two issues and you are on your way to a reliable system.
The question is, why are you thinking of writing your own system rather than adapting it, which is commercially available?
source to share