Warehouse management is concerned with ensuring that all the activities involved in warehousing are carried out efficiently and effectively by those employed in the warehouse. Online Encyclopedia of Business has defined warehouse management as “the process of coordinating the incoming goods, the subsequent storage and tracking of the goods, and finally, the distribution of the goods to their proper destinations”. Every organization, regardless of size, has developed and implemented its own management concepts in order for it to run smoothly and accomplish the vision, goals and objectives it has set forth. Management is ‘the process through which efforts of members of the organization are co-ordinate, directed and guided towards the achievement of organizational goals: the clarification of objectives, planning, organizing, directing and controlling other people’s work’. Mary Parker Follett was the first to define management as the art of getting things done through people. In common understanding, management is also referred to the body or group of persons who perform the various functions of management. The overall purpose of management is to ensure that the organization is able to achieve success through people. Management aims to increase organizational effectiveness and capability – the capacity of an organization to achieve its goals by making the best use of the resources available to it. Therefore, management can be defined as the process of achieving results by making the best use of available human, financial and material resources. Management has the following 3 characteristics (Management Innovations, 2008):
o It is a process or series of continuing and related activities.
o It involves and concentrates on reaching organizational goals.
o It reaches these goals by working with and through people and other organizational resources.
According to Armstrong and Michael the fundamentals of management is deciding what need to be done and getting it done through people in organization (Study Mode, 2011). They highlighted that people of an organization is the main resource among all other resources that is needed by a manager to manage, which indicates that a large proportion of management work is done through people of an organization. Therefore, in any management process managers plays a vital role in operating an organization.