Warehouse

[ajpiper2k]

For me, this unit is essential for several reasons. I even started a topic about this and refered to it as a distribution center within other posts.

This type of facility plays a major role in ensuring a consistency of supply chains (whether we are discussing raw materials or finished goods). This is particulary true since a purchaser can only buy from a single source.

A simple example is wool. I may have 3 factories that produce socks for a city. As sales pick up, it is possible that one of the farms runs out of wool (sometimes for a few weeks or even a month). Now my factory may have two purchasing units buying wool from two different farms. These units supply 3 manufacturing units within my factory. So, if one of these farms runs out of wool, my utilization severely drops during that time, even though I have wool available at other farms. Now, I can change my supply chain to go to another farm in order to keep my utilization up, but this isn't practical when you are running a multi-billion dollar opperation.

Currently, it is easier for me to build a factory for a group of 4 farms and set it up with 4 purchasing units and 4 sales units all running through a single inventory unit. Using this strategy, I'm able to have my purchasing units configured to buy from one of these factories. It is a pain and adds overhead to my pricing, but it is far better than having it affect store sales.

In my mind, there are two key issues that make this worth while:

1. Capacity / throughput - for many crops / finished goods, it is enough to have 3-4 production units going into a single warehouse. And then, that warehouse can supply 3-8 different purchasing units. But, there are products like textiles. I can easily have 8 textile factories supplying 16 different factories that make products that require textiles. It would be ideal to be able to pay more for a larger facility. But, it may not fit nicely into the 9 square management model.

2. We need to be able to be able to use this for finished goods. If I've got a bunch of factories making jeans, then I can have any number of stores getting jeans from the warehouse.

3. If we could upgrade a facility to go from small, to medium to large for a single fee, that would be awesome. So, our capacity can increase without us having to redefine the distribution lines just because we added more factories or stores.

My only other thought is regarding renting space to your competitors. I'm not a huge fan of this because of this for two reasons: First, I don't like the idea of ever helping the competition (even if I'm getting paid for it). Second, once they are taking up space, there is no way to limit the amount of space they are taking up or any way to kick them out when we need the space. I just see this as a trap and a waste of time.

Hope this helps.

[Bigs]

I totally agree with what Ajpiper2k says! Very good post!

[ystino]

I think warehousing buildings should be added with an inventory capacity 2 - 5 times (depending on size of warehouse chosen) of retail stores.

Warehousing should be performed for raw materials and finished goods.

Warehouses should also have a Sales unit that manages selling the goods. For instance, I can buy a certain product when it's cheap and then resell it at a higher price via my warehouse.

[HansOlav]

I also totally agree with what Ajpiper2k says! And it is a very good post!

[David]

Check out the Capitalism Lab web site for the new page about Warehouse: http://www.capitalismlab.com/warehouse.html

[HansOlav]

Thats fantastic!

[brianwiz]

Quick concern.

In reality can I do the following.

Buy an Oil spot. Sell it low and store in my warehouse for my own companies? Can david or a beta tester tell me if that would send someone to edge of collapse?

Basically I dont think Oil, Coal, etc should be able to dump in a warehouse.

This would make it easier to have low cost products then the AI .

[mwyeoh]

Quick concern.

In reality can I do the following.

Buy an Oil spot. Sell it low and store in my warehouse for my own companies? Can david or a beta tester tell me if that would send someone to edge of collapse?

Basically I dont think Oil, Coal, etc should be able to dump in a warehouse.

This would make it easier to have low cost products then the AI .

Hi Brianwiz

Warehouses are essentially a cheaper factory with higher throughput (But cannot manufacture anything)

As for your concern, I dont quite see the problem. You can already restrict sale to "Internal" so that only your own companies can buy from a firm
And if you are selling to yourself, you dont actually make a profit...
How would this send someone else to the "edge of collapse"?

And keeping a warehouse when unneccesary (You could sell direct from your mine) actually increases your production costs as you now have an extra warehouse (Plus land costs), extra shipping costs and extra staff costs too.

[brianwiz]

Thank you.

I now have a better sense of this function