Many stone plants have stock quantities in their system, but not where the stock actually is. Where the material sits lives in veteran workers' memory. This article covers how we handle storage locations in our stone-industry ERP, including the 2023 technology development project with the Stone & Resource Industry R&D Center (SRDC) and a 2024–2025 rollout at a primary stone processing plant in eastern Taiwan.
A primary stone processing plant typically has a raw-block yard, a rough-slab yard and a finished-slab yard, and slabs are further placed in specific areas by production stage and shipping batch. What we found was typical:
As orders, customers, stone types and batch shipments grew, this stopped working.
However good the system, it starts with a shared idea of what a "location" is. SRDC surveyed the plant's raw-block and stock yards, drew 2D/3D site maps, and worked with production and warehouse staff to define a location numbering scheme. The site map then became the base layer of the visual inventory screen.
With location numbers in place, we added location settings for materials and finished products in the ERP, plus lifting-category settings. From then on, every stock record has a definite location.
Based on the site map, we built a real-time visual inventory screen: how much material each location holds is visible right on the map, and entering an item number shows which location it's in, highlighted on the map. Managers can also see how storage space is being used and estimate how much more material they can take in.
The system is a web application built with ASP.NET Core Blazor and runs in a browser. We also built a phone and tablet version, so staff on the floor can look up where material is on their phones instead of walking back to ask someone.
In the 2023 technology development project, we combined location management with RFID so that "where it is" doesn't rely only on manual entry.
The code written to each tag includes a company code, the date (year/month/day) and a serial number.
The handheld reader app supports finding slabs, counting slabs, reading codes, writing codes and updating the database. When counting, staff choose a location and scan all its slabs (with an anti-re-read option), and the latest location is uploaded to the ERP as part of the count, so location data doesn't go stale when slabs are moved.
"ERP location" plus "handheld sensing" gives dual positioning: the location recorded in the system is the first layer, and where the reader actually senses the slab is the second, so each confirms the other when searching. With readers at the entrances, the system compares the tag number, read time and ERP stock status to determine automatically whether a slab is going out or coming in.
For plants considering location management: get the site map and location numbering right before the system. The numbering scheme is a language the whole plant shares — without agreement on it, a system just records the confusion more precisely.
For more detail, see our Industry ERP page and our article "How can a stone plant take inventory with RFID?". If your plant also struggles to know where material is, we'd be glad to talk.