The most common loss in a glass warehouse is not the glass going missing. The glass is there; it cannot be found. A piece close to the size needed is somewhere between the racks, but newer sheets have been put in front of it, its edge is not visible, and after fifteen minutes of looking nobody looks any longer. A new sheet is opened.
That loss is paid for twice: the time spent searching and the sheet opened for no reason. This is where a glass warehouse system actually contributes, not in the list on the screen. If where the piece sits is written in the record, the search takes ten seconds rather than fifteen minutes.
For that the record only has to carry four things: width, height, glass type and location. The location can be a rack name, a trestle number or whatever marking the workshop already uses; what matters is that it is consistent. A stock system already holds the dimensions, and what the warehouse side adds is the location.
Writing the location down looks like a matter of discipline but it is really a one time act. It is written as the piece goes onto the rack; every search afterwards benefits from that one writing. When it is not written, every search starts from nothing, which means paying the same cost again and again.
The accuracy of counting hangs on this too. A stock tracking system says how many sheets there are; the warehouse side says which one is where. When the two come apart the count is right but the work does not move: the figure is correct and the glass cannot be found.
Making the location easy to write is part of the system's job too. If rack names are defined in advance the choice is a single click; left as free text everyone uses their own spelling and search stops matching. When one person writes A3 for a rack and another writes a-3, two separate places come into being and the record quietly becomes useless.
As scale grows this becomes more decisive. The difference between stock tracking for a workshop and for a factory is that in a factory the same product can sit in several places. Without a location record, inventory at factory scale turns into a list of guesses, and nobody trusts that list.