Clothing Definitions — warehouse and distribution terms from Apparel Search
Warehousing is the business of holding the fashion industry's stock safely between production and sale. A warehouse is a commercial building for the storage of goods, used by manufacturers, importers, exporters, wholesalers, transport businesses and customs, and warehousing is the whole set of operations carried on inside it. This page defines warehousing, sets out the activities it covers — receiving, storing, safeguarding, retrieving and dispatching goods — and explains how it serves the clothing trade, from bonded storage of imports to the stockrooms behind retail distribution.
A warehouse is a commercial building for storage of goods. Warehouses are used by manufacturers, importers, exporters, wholesalers, transport businesses, customs, etc. They are usually large plain buildings in industrial parts of towns. They come equipped with loading docks to load and unload trucks; or sometimes are loaded directly from railways, airports, or seaports. They also often have cranes and forklifts for moving goods, which are usually placed on ISO standard pallets.
Some warehouses are completely automated, with no workers working inside. The pallets and product are moved with a system of automated conveyors and automated storage and retrieval machines coordinated by programmable logic controllers and computers running logistics automation software. These systems are often installed in refrigerated warehouses where temperatures are kept very cold to keep the product from spoiling, and also where land is expensive, as automated storage systems can use vertical space efficiently up to 10 meters and higher.
Traditional warehousing has been declining since the last decades of the 20th century with the gradual introduction of just in time (JIT) techniques designed to improve the return on investment of a business by reducing in-process inventory. The JIT system promotes the delivery of objects straight from the factory to the retail merchant, or from parts manufacturers directly to a large scale factory such as an automobile assembly plant, without the use of warehouses. However, with the gradual implementation of offshore outsourcing and offshoring in about the same time period, the distance between the manufacturer and the retailer (or the parts manufacturer and the industrial plant) grew considerably in many domains, necessitating at least one warehouse per country or per region in any typical supply chain for a given range of products.
Recent developments in marketing have also led to the development of warehouse-style retail stores with extremely high ceilings where decorative shelving is replaced by tall heavy duty industrial racks, with the items ready for sale being placed in the bottom parts of the racks and the crated or pallet-borne and wrapped inventory items being usually placed in the top parts. In this way the same building is used both as a retail store and a warehouse.
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The above article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/warehousing). 6/6/05 Modified by Apparel Search. |
The warehousing operation begins at the dock: goods are received, counted and checked against documents, and exceptions are recorded before the stock becomes the warehouse's responsibility. Storage follows a plan — pallets in racking, cartons on shelving, hanging garments on rails — with every location recorded so stock can be found again, increasingly by a warehouse management system directing each task. While goods rest, the warehouse protects them: from theft, fire, water and pests, and in apparel's case from the fading, mildew and crush damage that ruin saleable clothing. Retrieval reverses the flow — picking against orders, packing, and dispatch through the same docks — and the record-keeping that ties it together is what customers of a public warehouse are really buying.
Businesses choose among private warehouses they operate themselves, public warehouses that rent space and labor to many customers, contract arrangements between the two, and specialized forms such as bonded warehouses for imports awaiting duty payment and cold or climate-controlled storage for sensitive goods. For apparel, location and timing dominate: stock is seasonal, so warehouse capacity is planned around the intake peaks before each season, and overflow space is a normal line in a fashion logistics budget. The forklifts, cartons, racking and distribution centers defined in this section are warehousing's equipment and offspring — the modern distribution center grew out of the storage warehouse by adding speed. Underneath the variations, the definition on this page is constant: the commercial storage of goods, held in trust between the people who made them and the people who will sell and wear them.
Warehousing is the storage of goods in a commercial building, together with the operations of receiving, checking, storing, safeguarding, retrieving and dispatching them. It is carried on by manufacturers, importers, exporters, wholesalers, transport companies and customs authorities.
A bonded warehouse is a secure facility approved by customs where imported goods can be stored without paying import duty until they are withdrawn for sale. Apparel importers use bonded storage to defer duty and to hold goods that may be re-exported duty-free.
Warehousing emphasizes storage — holding stock over time. Distribution emphasizes movement — flowing goods through to stores or customers. Modern facilities blend both, and this glossary's distribution center definition covers the movement-focused end of the range.