The show must go on.
(Queen)
Welcome to the User Documentation of OpenWMS.org.
This part of the documentation shall be the first manual where you start reading to understand the key concepts of OpenWMS.org warehouse management system and to become an enthusiastic user or a Project Engineer who appreciates the huge amount of work we have done so far to build an open, free and hopefully widely used warehouse management system.
The license agreement (LGPL) is chosen very friendly, so that anyone can download, customize, build and sell the software like he or she wants to. Best open source projects can only survive with a maximum of feedback they earn, also OpenWMS.org relies on your feedback or improvement requests. Feel free to take part here.
The purpose of this manual is to explain the basic concept of OpenWMS.org, how the installation process works and how to customize basic settings regarding arbitrary runtime environments. It is not intended to explain a deeper system configuration or project customization respectively extensions. These topics are explained in more detail in the developer guide.
This documentation is written for all users of the OpenWMS.org application. Users, in that context, are not solely actors who work with the application to manage their daily business. But also Project Engineers who are deploying and customizing the system. All of them are addressed to read this manual. Part I and Part II describe the architecture and the installation process hence these two chapters are dedicated to Project Engineers, all other parts are tend to be read from all stakeholders. A list of stakeholders describes different roles and may not be mixed with terms of the applications Role Management that is specified later on.
Following types of users are addressed:
Project Engineer: Stakeholders which are primarily customizing and installing the application. They are in the role of a project consultant with a great knowledge about the application and the technologies behind. Customization and configuration is almost done by themselves. A person acting in this role is the main contact person for the final customer in case of change or support requests. Project Engineers are invited to share their experience in the OpenWMS.org forum and are requested to provide all kind of feedback to wikis or bug trackers. You are the guys who know best of customers business, so please tell us more!
Operator: An Operator is an user who operates on the application to do the daily work. This kind of stakeholder belongs almost always to the final customer. He or she has restricted responsibility to the functionality of the application, that means she is not allowed to access all existing functions of the GUI. She often belongs to a Role with limited user rights.
System Operator: The System Operator is a special kind of Operator who has advanced user rights but does not have the same rights like a Project Engineer has. Like an Operator the System Operator belongs to the customer and can inquire change requests or bug reports to a Project Engineer.
OpenWMS.org is an application with the purpose to build warehouse projects. The application itself is split into several sub projects that can be combined together to build up the whole application. The delivered sub projects cover most oft the concerns each warehouse project has.
An OpenWMS.org CORE project: This sub project is totally out of scope of any warehouse activities or requirements. It includes all the functionality around an enterprise application like security & user management, connectivity and integration capabilities. The core project is solely independent and can also be used in combination with other projects (not only OpenWMS.org).
The second sub project is called OpenWMS.org COMMON project and aims to be the base for all other sub projects. This project includes common domain classes that exist in all warehouse projects that were built with OpenWMS.org - think about Locations and TransportUnits for example. Every warehouse deals with these terms, probably with different characteristics but all projects know about them and their relationship to each other. Not only a common domain model but also common services that provide business functionality are part of this sub project.
The third one is called OpenWMS.org TMS. Many warehouse projects are built as automatic warehouses where PLCs are used to control the transportation of TransportUnits from a Location A to a Location B. In contrast to manual warehouses, where transports are carried out by the staff directly. All operations that are common in automatic warehouse projects are implemented in the OpenWMS.org TMS sub project. It includes additional domain classes and services that can be extended to project needs as well. Compared to latter sub projects it is not mandatory to use this one.
The last sub project is called OpenWMS.org WMS and targets all top-level warehouse management requirements like order- inventory handling or stock management. It is not mandatory to use this sub project, because there is no need for this in many warehouse projects. Several projects already have an ERP system on top, that is capable to handle WMS functionality.
Each of these sub projects consists of a backend part, that cares about the implementation of the business functionality, and a client part that implements the UI use cases and is used by operators. How all these sub projects (modules) work together is part of the next chapters.