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TopBackground
Effective management of the movement of physical goods largely rests on the ability to rapidly and easily identify what a particular physical item is. Thus, the ability to identify and track physical items and record movements becomes crucial to the success of a MLIS.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Logistics Information Systems: Interconnected hardware and software systems design to support logistics elements; e.g., coordination of logistics activities, material flow, and inventory replenishment.
Warehouse Management System: Supports the management of warehouses and distribution centres; particularly, the flow of materials along the inwards goods, storage, internal movement, and outwards goods or despatch.
Enterprise Resource Planning System: An integrated information management system over multiple business functions (e.g., manufacturing, logistics, sales, marketing, finance, and account) with the aim of capturing business transactions and storing data. This is a transactional system.
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID): A system consisting of tags able to respond to and emit radio signals and a network of readers. Together, these enable the automated capture of business transactions relating to the movement of goods with an RFID tag near to readers.
Manufacturing and Logistics Systems: Hardware and software systems designed to support the management of inventory and production over multiple supply chain tiers or companies to achieve a balance between costs and availability.
Supply Chain Event Management: A method to address the identification of deviations between a plan and its execution across the supply network while providing corrective actions according to predefined rules in order to improve decision making.
Transportation Management Systems: Support automation of the tasks relating to the transportation planning, optimisation, performance measurement, vehicle loading, routing, payments, and execution of transport-related activities.