Fedinventory/location

Experience managing inventory for vbzCart showed that some kind of hierarchical/nested/tree structure works well for this.

Each item of inventory (which could include a quantity, for mass-produced items) had a data record with a unique ID and was assigned to a "bin" (usually meaning a labeled banker's box), which was in turn assigned to a location within a storage facility ("warehouse"; in practice this was either a residence or a self-storage unit). A more generalized system would probably be easier to maintain, though, and be more usable for people with different storage arrangements.

When particular items are wanted, the system will retrieve their locations and can put together a pick-slip (ideally including an identifying photo for each item) to make it easier to find everything quickly. (This could either be a printout or, with modern mobile tech, shown on a phone or tablet). When items are physically moved from inventory, the picker should indicate that this has been done so that the inventory can be kept updated.

Example

As a rough example of a some of these ideas, see:

• htwiki:Category:Inventory/large_attic shows a listing of items in a particular location (the large attic in our house)
• htwiki:Inventory/LCD006 shows a page for a particular monitor unit in our inventory

The examples above use only out-of-the-box features of MediaWiki, and cannot properly implement many of the features desired for Fedinventory. Some additional features could be demonstrated by manually adding more category tags and so forth, but this requires a lot of manual updating that a properly-designed system would automate.