In the Dallas plant of IDES Corp., the warehouse stock is administered in a decentralized warehouse management system. As the Dallas plant is a delivering plant with a closed distribution center, all stock receipts are handled as goods receipts for purchase orders with an external vendor.

In this example, you create a purchase order for trading goods and process the goods receipt from the creation of the inbound delivery, through the putaway of the materials in the warehouse management system and the goods receipt in inventory management. The warehouse management system is located in a different logical system. This is because the distribution center should work independently of the processes in the central system. While processes in Accounting, Purchasing, Inventory Management or Sales and Distribution are executed in the central system (Enterprise Resource Planning System, ERP), the concrete, physical processing of the stock placement occurs in the warehouse management system. The Warehouse Management System, WMS, is located in its own, decentralized system, which communicates with the central system via ALE. The Dallas warehouse complex is set up as just such a decentralized warehouse.

In this example you will work in both the central system and the decentralized system, and switch between the ERP and the WMS.