I would like to ask a rather, general, high-level introductory kind of question regarding inventory management.
So, I was wondering if anyone on SO had any experience/knowledge, or worked with in the past in inventory, supply chain, procurement management settings. What typical problems or challenges one might find in this field and how computer science, mainly algorithms, data structures and optimization can can be employed to deal with such challenges/problems?
Could this be relevant to operational research, queue theory etc? I am not directly related to this field but would need to know how CS is applied in these domains.
An internet search produces some vague results, so I would greatly appreciate any prior-experience insight, educated advice, specific online resources, or even examples. I hope it is ok to ask such a high level question here.
Many thanks in advance
I have some experience with warehouse management systems. Much of it is not very sophisticated in a CS point of view, but there are some juicy optimization problems where CS can be applied. For example, to reduce the time spent to “pick” an order (go through the warehouse and collect the goods for an order), it’s desireable to find the shortest way to go to all those places in the warehouse, which boils down to the “traveling salesman problem”.
Another place where CS is applied is inventory taking; there are some very clever software products (e.g. INVENT Xpert) that allow a random sample inventory taking to reach the accuracy required by law; this means that instead of going to all storage locations and count the quantity stored there, only a small percentage (5-10%) of the locations are actually counted.