Is your current warehouse management system outdated? The practices you use in your warehouse are what make the difference between being productive and efficient rather than wasteful and slow. If you are not implementing the most current software procedures, you may be costing your company money in wasted time and lost revenue from limiting company growth.
Warehouse management and efficiency is changing on a daily basis. How do suppliers keep up with the competition? One major area where many warehouses can improve their systems is through order picking productivity.
Whether it is small pick pack items or larger items that take up multiple pallet locations here are five excellent solutions to maximize warehouse order picking efficiency.
A good Warehouse Management System (WMS) can be the key to a business’ success or failure. In a recent study released by UPS avid online shoppers now make more than half their purchases with e-commerce. These days, customers want to shop online, on their smart phones and in stores. Consumers are skilled at finding deals. They want to get sales event alerts and receive coupons by email and text message.
Even well established companies like Wal-Mart are struggling to capture their portion of the market. Businesses need to respond to the changing needs of tech savvy customers while taking advantage of that same technology to streamline their business model.
So how do you pick a system that’s just right for your ecommerce, distribution or fulfillment warehouse?
In today’s data driven world knowing how your warehouse is performing and finding areas to improve efficiency and speed of delivery are like gold to management and customers. Regularly running reports in your warehouse management system is critical for diagnosing the health of your inventory and warehouse management processes. In this blog we will discuss 9 reports that can help you identify which products are raising your inventory holding costs, improve the use of your warehouse space and define best practices for your labor force.
Massive amounts of data can be correlated at the touch of a button in order to spot trends, discover inefficiencies, and speed up the entire process. Workforce management is made simple and can be customized by need. You can maximize relationships that increase your bottom line and eliminate time and resource waste.
How do you determine which reports are the most useful to run? Well, we have done the work for you and have compiled what we have seen as the 9 most telling reports that your warehouse manager should be running to improve your overall warehouse efficiency:
Technology is advancing and customers are expecting product ordered today to be at their doorstep yesterday. Real-Time visibility of what inventory you have available in the warehouse, what inventory you have on order to the warehouse and what your upcoming order demand looks like is a necessity in today’s world. It is unacceptable to a customer for a company to not know where inventory is within their warehouse or to be out of stock. Now you have an angry customer that might just take their business elsewhere and may never return.
If your company is utilizing a Warehouse Management System you are headed in the right direction. Using a WMS to track the ins and outs of clientele product is essential to running a business in today’s crazy world.
However, some of those businesses out there may be using outdated software, or perhaps their software is non-existent. It may seem implausible, but if a small startup business is relying on sticky notes and spiral notebooks, things are going to fall apart really quickly. You don’t want this mayhem to happen to you.
If your company is losing clients due to obsolete methods, it’s time to upgrade to a WMS that offers easy-to-learn software that offers real-time visibility, whether you’re on site or not. There are four areas an advanced WMS demonstrates the importance of real-time visibility to a company’s inventory data:
If you have a small business, you may have wondered if it’s worth it to invest in a warehouse management system. After all, many of the advantages of a warehouse management system seem more suited to bigger businesses like 3PLs, distribution and fulfillment centers that need to keep track of and coordinate inventory across multiple warehouses. However, a warehouse management system can be beneficial for small businesses, too.
- Inventory Management
- Customer & Supplier Management
- Improving Employee Productivity
Sit back for a minute and reflect on the last time you interacted with Customer Service. Was it the returns counter at a retailer? Maybe it was a call to your work’s IT help desk or heaven forbid it was the ever dreaded phone call to your cable or internet service provider. Did you get all worked up and anxious because you knew it was going to be a fight? Did you get what you wanted out of the experience or did you give up and settle on the solution provided? Were you even able to get ahold of someone to talk too?
With the ever changing business landscape, technological advancement and instant access to information via the world wide web, customer service has been evolving too. 15 years ago you had to read the back of a package or the instruction manual that came with the product to find a customer service number or bring the product back to the place it was purchased for more information.
Fast forward to 2007. The internet was really starting to flourish, more people were gaining access and mobile phones were also attaining internet connectivity. More information was becoming accessible at one’s fingertips than ever before and it was instant (or what we thought was instant at the time). Now, fast forward to 2016. Today’s population has been consumed by the instant availability of services and information and now expect that instant gratification from a purchase or solution. Unfortunately, not all companies feel the need to provide that instant gratification with their customer service, well unless you want to pay for it.
Whether you are a 3PL, distributor, fulfillment, eCommerce or retail focused warehouse a great Warehouse Management System will streamline and speed up the way you do business. Chances are if there is a warehouse they will be using some type of warehouse management software. If you are expanding your business, need to choose a WMS for your new venture or looking to upgrade your current system, it can be difficult to navigate all the different systems and decide what will work best for your organization. Below we will explore a few of the initial steps that a professional warehouse operator should take to get the most out of their new warehouse management system.
Whether your business consists of just a handful of employees or you are a big-time, Nationwide Corporation, chances are you have something in common, and that is the need for organization in the warehouse. Having organized inventory utilizing a great warehouse management system means you can provide consistent and reliable service to your customers. In this blog you will read about just four of the reasons that excel is a poor choice for tracking inventory in your warehouse.
In the past, companies like 3PLs, distribution and fulfillment centers relied on paper to keep things running smoothly. Need to let your client know that the delivery time has been bumped up an hour? Fax them a notice on your company letterhead. Trying to locate the assistant to that VIP customer you’ve been dying to meet up with to talk numbers? Pull out the company Rolodex, look up their number and dial them up on the phone. What about the minutes from last week’s bimonthly company sit-down session? Locate it in the secretary’s filing cabinet by the front desk.
That worked well enough then, but technology has stepped up to the plate, and it deserves your attention! A warehouse management system consolidates these caveman-worthy methods into one reliable, real-time solution that works for all involved in the daily logistics of the company.
Here is why you need to upgrade to warehouse management software, and why fax machines, phones and physical filing cabinets are on their way out.
