IBM is a global leader in the new world of e-business, in which key business processes are integrated and inproved with Internet technologies. IBM Sanfrancisco is a major element in the IBM's e-business application framework.

IBM's architecture for building e-business aplications. This framework has several key attributes:

Enables robust applications that simplify complexity by having a single model spanning key services.

Integrates new applications with existing legacy data systems

Allows applications to grow by letting u choose the server most appropriate to the application & then move the application over timeas ur business grows or changes

Sanfrancisco Warehouse Management components provide a robust & flexible basis for devoloping customized solutions based on the management of products, warehouses and inventory. These three cornerstone concepts -product, warehouse and inventory are the key to mission-critical business operations in manufacturing, distribution and other industries.

Product

Warehouse Management provides the infrastructure for the managing product information including product definition and descriptive information. Sanfrancisco includes a number of extendable business policies such as product availability checking and lead time among others.

Warehouse

Sanfrancisco incorporates the basic structure to manage warehouse information to support important capabilities such as defining stock locations & stock zones as well as incorporating extendable business policies to manage those locations & zones.

Inventory

Keeping track of product invetory is essential to any distribution or manufacturing business. Sanfrancisco supports this by providing the basic objects and functionality required. Inventory is comprised of stock on hand and can be tracked by any combination of stock type, product, warehouse, unit of measure, lot, location & serial number.

Costing: Warehouse Management creates and maintains the cost(s) of each product, including necessary information like dates and assigns a cost for the stock withdrawl based on the company costing policy. Industry-standard costing policies such as standard, average, latest inbound, LIFO and FIFO are implemented by the framework.

Replenishment: Warehouse Management evaluates inventory in relation to the reorder point and makes recommendations for the orders from the supplier or another warehouse. Replenishment sources (e.g suppliers, internal warehouses) can be established on a per product/warehouse combination.

Stock Take: Warehouse Management provides the processes used for countaing physical stock. Stock Take uses business rules to determine rules what products should be included in the count. After the results of the count are entered, stock balances are updated and corresponding updates of costing and accounting can be made. The business rules involved are extensable to make them adaptable to different business practices.

Kit Definition: Warehouse Management supports the definition of simple kits composed of multiple products. Products can be selectively defined as kits or kit components on a unit of measure basis.

Stock Transactions: Warehouse Management supports the creation of stock increases and decreases and creates the necessary financial transactions. These stock transactions are used to capture both manual changes to stock as well as changes to stock which result from processes such as stock take, picking and reception among others.

The following processes defines a centralised set of processes that are intended to be used by higher level functions( for e.g, the picking needed for sales orderd and for stock movement in managed through the same process).

Picking:

Warehouse Management manages the picking process(picking products from stock) and provides the ability to adapt the process accountingrding to specific business and finance policies. The picking process may select the appropriate locations, lots and/or serial numbers for picking products from stock and adjusts inventory to reflect the correct amount while creating the necessary financial transactions. Pick lists can be selectively generated according to extendable business rules.

Reception:

Warehouse Management manages the reception process(reception of product into the warehouse) and provides the ability to adapt the reception process according to specific business and finance policies. The reception process will adjust inventory and create the necessary financial transactions. Reception notes can be selectively generated accroding to extendable business rules.

Sanfrancisco supports the variety of business objects that are part of these business processes & provides mainatnence processes to support the following objects within enterprise

Planning & Replanning

Quality Control

Shipping

Backorder handling