Design of an inventory management system for refrigerated warehouses on mobile environments

Abstract

It is an important job to manage the storing/unstoring state or the inventory state of logistics efficiently and accurately at the inventory management system for refrigerated warehouses. Since the inventory management system is running on the legacy system which is the closed client-server system, the maintenance of the system is costly and labor-intensive. Also, the inventory management system does not provide any services to the cosigners and the consigners should use phones or faxes to place or obtain orders. Thus, the business process becomes inefficient and inaccurate because the old-fashioned management system requires human involvement. In this paper, we design and implement the mobile framework to provide various services for a consigner with a mobile device. If a consigner requests the job or the information of logistics with a mobile device, the mobile framework connects to the legacy system and processes the job or retrieves the related data from the legacy system. Since the consigner is able to check the inventory state and handles the orders directly without any human involvement, the management for the refrigerated warehouse becomes more accurate and efficient. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.