Facilities Setup: Stores, Warehouses, Shipping

Introduction to Stores and Catalogs

Every business uses some kind of facility for operations, service delivery, business administration, inventory storage, online commerce, and the like. The types and variations of facilities used in business are innumerable.

In opentaps there are two ways to think about the facilities. One viewpoint is that the opentaps system will use a computer model to mimic the organization and type of facilities that your business actually uses, and it will implement the business processes that flow over these facilities.

The second viewpoint on this is that opentaps keeps its detailed information about your actual business processes and facilities in some database containers (entities) that are referred to by names that sound familiar, but which have specific meaning within the system.

• For example, every opentaps system uses one or more “store” setups that are the containers where data items and policies are stored including catalogs, shipping, regional taxation, inventory facilities, promotions and other items that may be specific to an operating location.
• Every opentaps system uses product catalog containers where product or service item sales data are organized. There will also be other catalogs where you document the items you purchase, either for resale or for consumption by your operations.
• Even if you don’t have a traditional physical store, as such, you will setup this "store container" on the system for its support of the facility and product data you need on the system to model how the business actually works.

The opentaps Stores functionality uses the Main Navigation item Catalog to set up the stores and catalogs database containers that support business processes for selling your products, or services. If you have a physical store or an online store, the containers you setup will correspond to them.

Categories and Catalogs (for Products)

Stores, or store containers in the system, are the containers for all of your products, that will be defined within a Category, and then within a Catalog. Categories and catalogs are the containers for your product data of all different kinds. For example, if you sell two brands of similar products, then you might want two catalogs (one for each brand) and one category for the general product type. If you sell products of basically different types, then you might want a category for each of them, and catalogs with products themselves. This approach is a way of organizing your data and product lines so that the opentaps system and your actual operating methods are aligned.

In any case, you need at least one opentaps store (container), one category, and one catalog in which to organize your operations, the product data, and the inventory that the system will be using for transaction processing.

You will use the Catalog applications and the Warehouse applications to set up the structures you will need as part of the Step-by-step Configuration of your system.