Terminology Explainer
Introduction🔗
There's an old computer science joke: "There are 2 things that are hard in computer science: cache invalidation, off-by-1 errors, and naming things"
Putting aside the cheesy off-by-1 part of the joke, the "naming things" part is very true. We could spend all our time arguing about naming things, and never deliver any useful system at all!
Our approach is to try and combine industry standard naming, what is customary in health supply chains in different countries, all with a nod to mSupply's historical names for things. It's clearly impossible to find names that will satisfy all those criteria, so this user guide page will hopefully ease the pain.
Items, Products, SKUs🔗
Open mSupply is different to other inventory management systems in that the core concept for inventory is an item - which is usually a generic medicine or product with the unit of measurement specified, but no pack size. There's a good reason for this:
- Most public health systems operate on generic names
- Reporting usually wants to know the total amount of generic item, not just of a particular product/SKU1 that was used
Item variants in Open mSupply are the equivalent of an SKU - they have a brand, barcode, pack size, etc.
Facilities, Warehouses, Stores, Sites, Organisational Units🔗
Each of major ERP systems uses different terminology for site-level organizational units that manage inventory:
In mSupply, we have the following concepts
| Concept | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Store | A (virtual) store is a unit that manages it's own inventory and transactions. It has it's own users with their own set of permissions |
| Site | A (remote) site has an Open mSupply server that synchronises with the Open mSupply central server. A site can contain 1 or more stores (for example, it might have one essential medicines store, a laboratory items store, and an EPI store, all managed by different users, but all logging in [usually on the local wifi network] to the same server) |
| Facility | The physical complex at a particular geographical location. Usually a facility will have a single Open mSupply site, even if it has lots of physical stores. The only reason to have more than one site at a facility is if the stores can't all connect to the same local network. |
Comparison with other ERP systems:🔗
In Odoo, this concept is typically referred to as a "Warehouse." Each warehouse represents a physical location where inventory is stored and managed, while still being part of the broader company structure.
In SAP, this would be called a "Plant" or "Storage Location" depending on the exact context. A Plant represents a separate facility or manufacturing site that manages its own inventory.
In Microsoft Dynamics, this concept is called a "Site" or "Warehouse" depending on which Dynamics product you're using (Dynamics 365 Business Central vs. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management).
SKU = Stock Keeping Unit - a particular brand, pack size (and maybe packging variation) of an item.