Volume 12 Issue 2 - April 2003 Out of the Maze A Publication of Minotaur Software Ltd.     Minotaur Hierarchical Warehouse System By Victor Boersma A number of Minotaur clients have been expanding and adding additional operations, often involving new physical warehousing and production facilities. They have indicated that they would like to continue using Minotaur to address the needs of those new facilities. Traditionally, Minotaur has responded to such requests by suggesting the purchase of another Minotaur system or database for the new operations. While this solution works reasonably well when the operations are related but not closely integrated, there are issues for more closely integrated operations. In particular :     Consolidated sales analyses required downloading sales figures from multiple Minotaur databases and amalgamating them in a spreadsheet. Consolidated financial analyses likewise required downloading financial data from multiple Minotaur databases and amalgamating them in a spreadsheet. Inter company transactions, especially transactions related to inventory, receivables and payables required very careful attention to detail to be completed synchronously in the databases involved in the transaction.     We have recently developed the Minotaur Hierarchical Warehousing Module which provides an alternative mechanism for handling highly integrated related operations.     The Hierarchical Warehousing Module essentially allows you to define multiple high level "master" locations within your operation. It then allows definition of sub-locations for each master location so you can still keep track of areas within a particular plant such as the loading docks, raw material and finished good warehouses and production facilities. Sales order, shipment, invoice, purchase order and inventory bill (receiving) transactions all allow identification of material location at the part line item level so that an inventory bill, for example, can receive product into multiple locations within a master warehouse. Sales order, shipment, invoice, purchase order, inventory bill, production run, and adjustment transactions can be assigned separate numbering sequences for each master warehouse so that users can tell at a glance which operation the transaction relates to. So for example, invoices from master location A might all start with the letter A and invoices from master location B might all start with the letter B. There is a GL account suffixing mechanism in place which will allow you to assign general ledger accounts by master location. Thus for example, if the main inventory account for a part is 15000, then selling that part from warehouse A would credit general ledger account 15000-A but selling it from warehouse B would credit general ledger account 15000-B. This functionality would be in place for all transactions. A variety of reports will allow reporting by master warehouse. First, many inventory and transactional reports have added capability to print information for only a particular warehouse. Further, if the user elects to run the report for a master warehouse, the system will print transactions for the master warehouse and all sub-locations of that master warehouse. There are new mechanisms to generate transfers of product between warehouses through the standard purchasing and sales modules so that it is possible to generate standard paperwork for these transactions yet have the system post only a simple transfer. Please contact Minotaur for further details if you are expanding your operations to incorporate additional locations on a highly integrated basis.     Page1 Page2

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