5 Ways to Improve Your Logistics

5 Ways a Warehouse Management System Can Improve Your Logistics

Here are the 5 most common warehouse challenges and how a warehouse management system can overcome them. Learn how to improve logistics with WMS.

Your warehouse is busy receiving and stocking goods, fulfilling orders, replenishing inventory, shipping, managing inventory and labor costs, dealing with equipment challenges, and more. And if your business has more than one warehouse, the challenges are two-fold.

The pandemic's accelerated eCommerce and required safety protocols have increased warehouse complexity. As we start a new year in the new normal, ask yourself: Are my warehouse operations as productive and profitable as I want?

If the answer is no, it's time to take a closer look at a warehouse management system (WMS). Here are five of today's most common warehouse challenges and how a WMS can overcome them.

Operating costs

Several factors contribute to your warehouse operating costs, and seemingly insignificant things add up. A common cause is paper-based processes, which lead to wasted time and lost documents. Finding your stock becomes a guessing game as your workers run marathons around your warehouse. And if you don't use barcode scanning, order errors and returns pile up.

WMS automates your warehouse processes so you can ditch the paper. It also identifies your fast-moving inventory so you can stay close to your packing stations, reduces fill times on small or standard orders, and offers accurate real-time data to optimize raw material or item scheduling, eliminating excess stock and inventory.

The main thing is? WMS can reduce your operational costs by 20-30% and significantly increase efficiency.

Customer satisfaction

Customers are happy when they receive the perfect order: the right product in the right quantity in the right condition at the right address. But without the right technology, orders can be far from perfect. And with the dramatic increase in eCommerce, smaller orders at a higher frequency make it increasingly difficult to gain customer trust.

WMS scanning devices can be 10 times faster than manual transactions. Processing more transactions with greater accuracy increases productivity across your warehouse and makes perfect orders less elusive. You can also choose the right picking method in WMS, which directly affects customer satisfaction, reduces picking costs, and impacts your bottom line.

Inventory Management

It's impossible to manage your inventory accurately with different systems that can't "talk" to each other, and tracking inventory in Excel is an exercise in futility. Both scenarios involve tedious and repetitive data entry and human error.

The right WMS facilitates easy-to-trace processing of non-trackable, batch and serial transactions as well as flexible warehouse, zone and bin structures — leading to nearly 100% inventory accuracy. This applies on a quantity basis and on a location-by-location level.

Product Traceability

In a complex global supply chain where a single disruption can wreak havoc, you need full forward and reverse traceability, recall management and audit trails. To protect your brand and reputation, you must ensure counterfeit goods do not end up in your warehouse.

WMS allows you to manage quality by modifying and documenting product quality status, including quarantined, released, blocked, and rejected. It also supports two-way traceability and provides unlimited batch attributes so you can register important information to achieve electronic traceability. Easily track and trace products across the supply chain based on item codes, barcodes, batch numbers, and more — including complete visibility of materials used to produce batches/lots, movements, and stock levels.

Inbound and Outbound Logistics

Picking, packing, shipping and managing multiple logistics flows is very challenging. Likewise developing direct routes to consumers for various distributed products.

WMS simplifies inbound and outbound logistics. It facilitates inbound (e.g., container and PO receiving, palletizing, and last-mile transactions) and targeted outbound (e.g., picking management, including shelf-life-considered picking, inventory allocation, and shipping) transactions.

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