A Smart Warehouse Management System for Inventory Control and Operational Efficiency: Design, Implementation and Functional Evaluation

Abstract

Warehouse operations that depend on paper records, spreadsheets, and delayed reconciliation are subject to inaccurate inventory records, limited visibility of stock movements, slow reporting, and weak accountability. These weaknesses motivate the adoption of integrated webbased warehouse management systems, particularly in settings where capital for barcode or RFID infrastructure is unavailable. This study designs, implements, and functionally evaluates a Smart Warehouse Management System (SWMS) that centralizes inventory and warehouse operations on commodity hardware, and provides assisted information retrieval through a natural-language query interface. A descriptive, multi-method study was used to characterize existing warehouse practice and derive system requirements. Direct observation, a thirteenitem structured interview schedule, and review of warehouse documentation informed requirements analysis. The system was implemented as a three-layer web application over a document-oriented data model of twenty-four collections and evaluated through functional verification and qualitative usability, performance, and security reviews. The implemented system supports role-based access control, product and category management, vendor and customer records, zone, rack, and bin location management, stock receiving and dispatch, adjustment and audit workflows with variance detection, threshold-based low-stock alerting, on-demand reporting, and natural-language inventory query in English and Somali. Five of seven specified functional test cases were executed and passed; the two covering audit variance computation and permission refusal were not executed and are reported as gaps. Qualitative usability, performance, and security reviews indicated acceptable operation under the tested conditions, but were not instrumented to yield quantitative measures. The study demonstrates the feasibility of integrating conventional warehouse functions with web-based access and assisted retrieval on a platform deployed and evaluated without any barcode, RFID, or scanning equipment. The evaluation establishes functional correctness rather than operational improvement; quantified field evaluation against the incumbent process remains necessary and is specified as the next step.