Warehouses & Locators

You've defined your items - great. But where will you actually put them? This is where Warehouses and Locators come in. They're the spatial map of your inventory: where each item lives, how it moves, and who's responsible for it.

The Warehouse: Your Primary Inventory Container

A warehouse in NaMa ERP isn't necessarily a building. It's any place where you want to track a separate inventory balance. It could be:

• A large physical warehouse
• A shelf in a showroom
• A mobile distribution truck
• A "goods in transit" area between two branches
• A sorting or quarantine area for goods under inspection

The simple rule: if you want to know "how much do I have here?" independently, make it a warehouse.

Warehouse Types

Not all warehouses are the same. The system distinguishes several types, each with different behavior:

• Standard warehouse: ordinary storage for goods available to sell and issue.
• Transit warehouse: holds goods while they move between two locations, so they appear available at neither the sending nor the receiving side until the transfer completes.
• Inspection/sorting warehouse: received goods land here before approval, so they don't enter available stock until quality clears them.
• Reservation warehouse: dedicated to items reserved for specific customers or orders.

Choosing the right type matters because it determines when a location's stock counts toward "available to sell."

Who's Responsible? The Warehouse Keeper and Permissions

For each warehouse you can assign a warehouse keeper - the employee responsible for it. This helps you:

• Route receiving and issuing tasks to the right person
• Set permissions that prevent users from transacting in warehouses outside their scope
• Maintain accountability during stock taking and reconciling differences

You can also link the warehouse to a branch and a group, set its priority (for automatic warehouse selection), and configure its own default purchase and sales units.

Warehouses and Requirements Planning (MRP)

You can decide whether a particular warehouse is included in Material Requirements Planning (MRP) calculations. A showroom display warehouse may not be something you want counted as available for production, while your main raw-materials warehouse should be.

Locators: Precision Inside the Warehouse

Inside a large warehouse, knowing you have "200 boxes" isn't enough - where exactly are they? Which aisle, which shelf, which pallet? This is where Locators come in.

A locator is a subdivision within the warehouse: aisle A, shelf 3, or a "fast-moving goods" zone. Enabling locators gives you:

• The exact location of each item
• Direction for warehouse staff straight to the pick location
• Organization of goods by movement, size, or storage requirements

Locator Policy: Required or Prevented?

For each warehouse you set the locator policy:

• Required: no item can be received or issued without specifying its location - ideal for large, organized warehouses.
• Prevented: don't use locators at all - suitable for a small warehouse or a distribution truck.

Each locator can also prevent receiving or issuing individually (e.g. a "damaged" locator that accepts goods but prevents issuing them for sale), be linked to a specific supplier or customer when needed, and take a selection priority within automatic picking.

Location Classes

When locators multiply, location classes help you group them by nature: refrigerated, frozen, high-value, quarantine... then apply rules to a whole class rather than a single locator. An item requiring refrigeration can be routed automatically to locators of the "refrigerated" class.

Rack Quantities

For warehouses that need precision beyond the locator level, the system supports tracking quantities at the rack level within a single locator - useful in large distribution centers where one locator contains several racks.

Linking Items to Warehouses

It's impractical for every item to be stored in every warehouse. So the system lets you link items to warehouses, defining the preferred warehouses for each item with a given priority. The benefits:

• The system automatically suggests the most appropriate warehouse on receipt or issue
• It prevents storing items in warehouses unsuited to them
• It simplifies document entry for the user

Warehouse Groups

When the number of warehouses grows, warehouse groups bundle them for reporting and organization: for example a "Northern Region Warehouses" group or a "Showroom Warehouses" group. You can then pull an inventory report for an entire group at once.

Warehouse Usage Policy

Linking items to warehouses tells the system which warehouses suit an item. Sometimes, though, you need the opposite kind of rule: you want to stop a warehouse from being used at all - in certain documents, by certain users, or during a certain period. That's the job of the Warehouse Usage Policy.

Picture a few everyday situations:

• A warehouse is being counted this week, so nobody should issue or receive against it until the stock take is finished.
• A seasonal showroom warehouse should only be touched by the showroom team, not by central purchasing.
• An old warehouse is being phased out: you want to block new transactions on it from a certain date forward, without deleting any of its history.

A Warehouse Usage Policy is a master file holding a grid of rules. Each line answers four questions: which warehouse, in which documents, for whom, and when.

Column	What it controls
For Type (للنوع)	The document type the rule applies to - e.g. a stock issue, stock receipt, or stock transfer.
Entity List (قائمة الأنواع)	A reusable list of several document types, for when one rule should cover more than a single type.
Applicable For (مطبق على)	Who the rule targets: a specific user, a user group, a security profile, or a criteria definition. Leave it empty to apply the rule to everyone.
Warehouse (المخزن)	The warehouse - or a whole warehouse group - the rule governs. This is required.
Prevent Usage (منع الاستعمال)	Tick this to actually block the warehouse.
From Date / To Date	The period during which the rule is active. Leave both empty for an open-ended rule.

How a rule kicks in

The check happens the moment you save a supply chain document - not buried in a report you read later. The system looks at the document's type, the user entering it, and the document's date, then inspects both the header warehouse and the warehouse on every line. A line is blocked when a policy rule matches all of the following and has Prevent Usage ticked:

• its For Type (or entity list) includes the document's type,
• its Warehouse is the one being used - or that warehouse belongs to the referenced warehouse group,
• the document date falls inside the From/To window (an empty window always matches),
• and Applicable For matches the current user - directly, through their group or security profile, or through a matching criteria definition - or is left empty.

When all of that lines up, the save is rejected with a clear message naming the blocked warehouse, the date, and the user, so it's obvious why the document won't go through. Leaving Applicable For empty makes the block apply to everyone; an empty date window makes it permanent.

You'll find Warehouse Usage Policy among the supply chain master files, right next to Warehouses and Warehouse Groups.

How It All Fits Together

Imagine a typical distribution center:

1. A shipment arrives and is first received into the inspection warehouse.
2. After quality clears it, it's transferred to the main warehouse, specifically to a locator in the appropriate aisle.
3. Items requiring refrigeration are routed automatically to locators of the "refrigerated" class.
4. When a sales order arrives, the system suggests the warehouse and locator based on item-warehouse links and locator priorities.
5. Goods distributed to distant branches are held in a transit warehouse during transport until they arrive and the transfer is received.

This spatial structure is the foundation on which all the stock movements we'll cover in the next sections operate.

Next Steps

• Receiving Stock - bringing items into these warehouses
• Issuing Stock - taking them out
• Moving Stock Between Warehouses - transferring them from one warehouse to another
• Stock Taking - verifying that book and physical balances match