Boost Warehouse Productivity with a WMS
Published on 31 March 2023
Are you still running your warehouse with pen and paper? Are your employees relying on spreadsheets to know the state of inventory in the distribution center? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then your business is in serious trouble.
In every industry, companies are rushing to implement modern distribution strategies in their warehouses and DCs. Thanks to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), technology solutions are more accessible than ever before that enable companies to better manage their inventory and boost their productivity. If your operation is still relying on analog solutions and legacy systems from the 90s, the simple fact of the matter is that it will not be able to keep up much longer.
But it’s not all doom and gloom, because there’s a warehouse management system (WMS) out there that’s been designed to help your company step effortlessly into the 21st century.
A WMS is a core piece of software that efficiently supports day-to-day warehouse operations. Warehouse management systems provide centralized control over activities and inventory in the warehouse, which enables distribution, retail, and manufacturing companies to optimize their processes and significantly improve their throughput.
Below, we highlight just some of the advantages you can get from leveraging a warehouse management system.
A WMS Augments Productivity in the Workplace
One of the biggest advantages of using a WMS is that it boosts productivity in the workplace. With an automated replenishment system to top up pick face stock, for example, a WMS dramatically improves the management and flow of your inventory. By supporting employees on their mobile devices, a WMS also makes the process of picking items from the warehouse much faster and less prone to errors, which also facilitates invoicing and the transfer of items to another location. A WMS can also help with a multitude of smaller difficulties in the workplace, such as obsolete fulfillment methods and low employee morale due, which lead to a slow, inefficient, and unproductive warehousing business. By leveraging a WMS’s capabilities, you can upgrade your procedures and improve the working environment, which are known to boost an operation’s efficiency.
Accurate Inventory Visibility with a WMS
A key advantage to the WMS is that it unlocks the ability to improve a company’s inventory management. Keeping track in real time of where all your products are in the warehouse is simply impossible if you’re still relying on pen and paper, and losing track of quantities can lead to inventory shrinkage and other costly operational penalties. A WMS enables you to locate items in real-time and keeps your workers apprised of all essential item data on a centralized interface, ensuring that everybody is on the same page, from sales to shipping. Warehouse management systems also enable you to rigorously identify your fast and slow movers, so you can optimize your slotting strategy and reduce downtime.
A WMS Enables Advanced Inventory Management Strategies
Improving inventory management within the four walls, from receipt to shipping, is the first step toward improving your operation’s overall efficiency. That’s exactly what a good WMS enables. It greatly enhances a company’s inventory management capabilities by providing crucial information on stock movement, expiration dates, order profiles, etc., which in turn helps speed up inventory turnover. It can assist operators in cutting lead times by minimizing inventory movement and enhancing record accuracy, which lowers the demand for safety stock and optimizes capacity in the DC.
Space Optimization is Easy with a WMS
Industrial real estate is expensive, and it’s not getting any cheaper. Making the best of the space you have can often be the differentiator between a profit-efficient operation and margins so thin they deprive you of the necessary cash flow to run a successful business. Thanks to the wealth of inventory data it provides, a WMS can help better organize and thereby increase the number of items that can be stored in a warehouse. It can, for instance, factor in your SKUs and locations' dimensions to determine where to store each item in order to maximize capacity.
At the Generix Group North America, we provide a series of solutions within our Supply Chain Hub product suite to create efficiencies across your entire supply chain. Our WMS solutions are in use around the world and our experience is second-to-none.
We invite you to contact us to learn more.
Download our Guide to the Warehouse of the Future
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