Warehose Management System (WMS)

Tweet

It is a thin line between a good investment in the warehouse and a waste of money.
That's why it should be well acquainted with the processes in the warehouse, and to know also opportunities and profitability of investment in automation in the warehouse.

Call us to explore tohether how much of IT and automation is enough in your warehouse!

The Modern Warehouse!

A good WMS gives a company better control over its stock and helps to eliminate errors, thereby optimizing processes and the usage of space. The resulting increase in efficiency can be a critical element for survival in the distribution industry, since warehouses today make their money by driving their costs down.

Lost Revenue

In a hectic warehouse environment, an increasing number of smaller, customized orders can result in inefficient warehouse processes and make it difficult to provide quick, creative solutions to some of the following common problems:

Poor inventory control:

• Items or whole pallets of goods go missing and your employees waste time trying to locate them. Even if you are sure you received them, you don’t know where they’ve been put away.
• You think you have 15 items, but you really only have 10, causing errors in ordering, shipping and invoicing—and irritating your customers.
• A vendor needs a quick answer how much of stock of certain item you have in your warehouse, but you can’t give a clear answer.
• You don’t have control over next week’s orders, prompting guesswork in your day-to-day employment; hire too many workers on a slow day and you lose money—hire too few on a busy day and you lose efficiency and revenue.

Poor time management:

• Workers waste time searching for items—retracing their paths to pick for multiple orders or looking for places to put away items.
• From the receiving dock, employees put away items that could have been moved directly to shipping, thereby losing time on an order and storing items unnecessarily.
• Inefficient duplication of effort:
• Employees from different departments enter the same warehouse information into different, and sometimes incompatible, programs or systems, wasting time and increasing the chance of error.

Poor management of warehouse space:

• Dead inventory or empty bins go unnoticed, taking up expensive space that you could put to better use.
• Your warehouse is still set up as it was for your old business; the new inventory has simply taken over the existing locations, in a possibly inconvenient order. The most popular items are scattered throughout your warehouse, wasting workers’ time in retrieving them. New or temporary employees have difficulty understanding your placement “logic,” making them inefficient.

Full inventory control increases accuracy and improves customer service:

• A good WMS gives a complete overview of the warehouse at all times—in real time. It adds an extra degree of intelligence for deciding where to put items away and how to store them—thereby optimizing space utilization.
• The system also helps to improve receiving and shipping information accuracy, in turn helping to avoid ordering and billing errors

Directed pick and put away speeds up order handling, cuts warehouse costs and increases morale:

• When processing incoming and outgoing orders, the WMS directs workers to the exact zones and bins where they must pick or put away items. It can process several orders at once and provide an efficient path for workers to take through the aisles for picking or putting away, saving time and energy. Workers can even receive instructions (via radio frequency) on small screens mounted in their trucks or on their hand-held scanners.
• Just as importantly, this type of system improves morale in a warehouse operation. People who work on the warehouse floor don’t like to waste time. They don’t like the frustration of wandering around searching for items. With a WMS, instructions are much clearer because the system knows exactly where the inventory is located.
• WMS makes employees 20 to 30 percent more efficient—increasing your company’s output 20 to 30 percent, and enabling you to deliver a much higher quality service than before—with the right item delivered to the right customer at the right time.

Better overview allows for closer cooperation with customers and suppliers:

• The visibility provided by a WMS provides a constant overview of inventory levels and your commitments to customers and vendors, allowing for more confident planning. It also allows you to analyze statistics with timely, accurate information.
• Now that you can register every single move in the warehouse, you can make reports on warehouse processes, and it’s easier for you to see how these processes should be handled and you can go to your suppliers and customers and discuss how you can improve things in cooperation

Radio frequency and bar code scanning increases data accuracy:

• Radio frequency (RF) and bar code scanning technology, which includes a wide range of hand-held or truck-mounted bar code scanners and ways to send information from the scanner to the central system by RF, turns a warehouse into a real-time enterprise.
• When an item is inbound, you can scan it so that the details of that item are transferred into your system. Then, when it comes to shipping, you just scan it again and ship it out. The WMS database instantly updates the information about items when they have been scanned.
• This also eliminates the need for employees to move goods on the floor for data input or mess about with paper documents. Once inbound items are scanned, the system—by, for example, a small screen on a hand-held scanner—gives instructions for where to put them away. At the same time, the scanner can send a message to the central system by RF that these items are in-house. The use of RF and bar coding technology with a WMS reduces the chance for input error to less than one percent.

Full integration with an ERP system increases efficiency and productivity:

• When a WMS is an integrated part of a company’s complete enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, everyone in the organization—from purchasing to manufacturing to sales—has the same real-time overview of inventory and movement in the warehouse. “When the system is synchronized 100 percent of the time, then five to ten seconds after a truck driver has put away a pallet, its location and availability is visible for every employee in the company,”
• This synchronization makes everyone’s job easier—beyond the walls of the warehouse as well. “Our sales department must have a good overview of the goods we have in-house

Increased Efficiency and Reduced Costs:

• There’s no room for lost pallets in today’s market. Having control over your warehouse and inventory can save you money and increase your productivity. A WMS helps you to gain full control of your inventory, which helps you to improve customer service and optimize warehouse space.
• If used in conjunction with RF and scanning devices, a WMS helps you to drastically reduce errors, while improving inventory tracking and accuracy. Integration with the rest of a company’s business system allows for everyone in the organization to access “real time” figures from the warehouse—on command. “Once the WMS is in place, the time and labor savings, along with the increase in production, will more than pay for the system over time,”