Requirements

Let's design a Warehouse Management System (WMS). Imagine a bustling warehouse filled with diverse products, constantly receiving shipments, managing inventory, and fulfilling orders. Our WMS needs to efficiently handle all these operations. We need to model the warehouse layout, the products it contains, the storage locations, and the various operations performed within the warehouse. A key aspect is optimizing storage and retrieval processes, ensuring efficient utilization of warehouse space, and minimizing the time it takes to fulfill orders. Think about how different types of storage (shelves, pallets, bins) and picking strategies (FIFO, LIFO) impact the design. Furthermore, the system needs to be robust, handling concurrent requests from multiple users and ensuring data consistency. # Requirements ## Functional Requirements 1. **Warehouse Definition:** * Ability to define a warehouse with attributes like name, location, and dimensions. * Support for different storage types within the warehouse (e.g., shelves, pallets, bins, racks). * Ability to define zones within the warehouse (e.g., receiving, storage, packing, shipping). 2. **Product Management:** * Ability to add new products with attributes like SKU, name, description, dimensions, weight, and storage requirements (e.g., temperature, humidity). * Ability to update product information. * Ability to search for products based on various criteria. 3. **Storage Location Management:** * Ability to add storage locations (e.g., shelves, bins, pallets) with unique identifiers and attributes like capacity, dimensions, and location within the warehouse. * Ability to assign products to storage locations, considering storage requirements and capacity. * Ability to track the quantity of each product at each storage location. * Support for different storage strategies (e.g., fixed location, randomized storage). 4. **Inventory Management:** * Ability to receive new shipments of products and update inventory levels. * Ability to track inventory levels in real-time. * Ability to generate inventory reports (e.g., stock levels, low stock alerts). * Support for cycle counting and physical inventory counts. 5. **Order Management:** * Ability to create orders with items to be picked. * Ability to allocate inventory to orders. * Ability to generate pick lists for warehouse staff. * Support for different picking strategies (e.g., FIFO, LIFO, shortest path). * Ability to track the status of orders (e.g., pending, picking, packing, shipping, completed). 6. **User Management:** * Ability to manage user accounts with different roles and permissions (e.g., administrator, warehouse staff). * Ability to track user activity. 7. **Reporting and Analytics:** * Generate reports on warehouse performance, such as order fulfillment time, inventory turnover, and space utilization. ## Non-Functional Requirements 1. **Thread Safety:** The system must be thread-safe, allowing concurrent access from multiple users and processes without data corruption or inconsistencies. Proper synchronization mechanisms should be used to protect shared resources. 2. **Extensibility:** The system should be designed to be easily extensible to support new features and integrations in the future. Consider using design patterns like Strategy, Factory, and Observer to achieve this. 3. **Modularity:** The system should be modular, with well-defined components that can be developed and tested independently. This promotes code reusability and maintainability. 4. **Testability:** The system should be designed to be easily testable, with unit tests for individual components and integration tests for interactions between components. Use Dependency Injection to facilitate mocking and testing. 5. **Maintainability:** The code should be clean, well-documented, and easy to understand, making it easier to maintain and debug. Follow SOLID principles to ensure maintainability. 6. **Performance:** The system should be performant, with minimal latency for common operations like inventory lookup and order processing. Optimize data structures and algorithms for efficiency. 7. **Scalability:** While not a distributed system design, the code should be written in a way that components could be scaled out to multiple instances in the future. For example, avoid global state where possible. 8. **Data Consistency:** Ensure data consistency across all operations, especially during concurrent updates. Use appropriate transaction management if interacting with a persistent store (even if mocked for this exercise). ## Core Entities 1. **Warehouse:** Represents the physical warehouse with its properties. 2. **StorageLocation:** Represents a specific location within the warehouse where products are stored. 3. **Product:** Represents a product stored in the warehouse. 4. **Inventory:** Represents the quantity of a product at a specific storage location. 5. **Order:** Represents a customer order to be fulfilled. 6. **OrderItem:** Represents a specific item in an order. 7. **PickList:** Represents a list of items to be picked from the warehouse to fulfill an order. 8. **User:** Represents a user of the system.

Design Warehouse Management System.

Requirements

Interview Simulation

Functional Requirements

💡 Interview Tip

Non-Functional Requirements

Core Entity Identification

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