What is a Warehouse Management System?
Warehouse Management Systems, in the digital age, is disrupting businesses globally. Economies are witnessing a global shift into the digital universe including once purely physical systems like the warehouse
Digitally, technological advancements in warehouse management have created an alternate universe full of innovations that helps one to keep ahead in this era. No industry can survive global commerce without a firm spine of digital technology in operations. Businesses must amend their warehouse management practices to tend to change customer expectations.
A seamless warehouse management system remains at the core of every warehouse management system. As a result, businesses have greatly benefitted from the modern warehouse management systems that keep your business progressive in all segments.
Warehouse Management System - Definition
A warehouse management system is a software solution that offers a full view of a business inventory and helps manage end-to-to-end supply chain operations. An end-to-end solution for warehousing takes into consideration the warehouse layout, day to day operations, and labour management. To keep the process at optimum levels, WMS integrates all the facets of warehouse operations to maximize productivity and efficiency.
A WMS solution maintains a centralized system that controls different warehouse management tasks. It’s a unified interface that lets warehouse managers stay updated and lets them control all the processes and functions.
Functions of Warehouse Management System
To understand the efficiency and improvements a WMS can bring, we must understand its myriad functional aspects. Below are key functions of a warehouse management system that create value at the basic level of the warehouse ecosystem.
Tracking Stock Inventory in a Warehouse
For a seamless function of the warehouse, monitoring inventory processing is essential at every level. First, it is necessary to track the stocks to ensure correct shipping. It empowers the warehouse managers with deep insights into stock availability and processing; providing optimal time to restock the inventory.
WMS empowers the warehouse managers to have clarity and visibility into the demand vs supply of their goods to keep the inventory replenished. A robust WMS environment effectively eradicates the problems of stock shortages or overstocking. It also plays a pivotal role in warehouse space optimization, ensuring equal inventory distribution.
A contemporary and robust warehouse management system ensures accuracy and faster turnaround time.
Picking and Shipping
Another crucial aspect h of the functions of warehouse management is picking the correct inventory and shipping it to the right customer on time. Unfortunately, the legacy warehouse systems had several ambiguities, such as inaccurate and incomplete data and inefficient inventory tracking. These gaps lead to inadequate and wrongly processed inventory shipping to the customer.
Hence an upgraded and new-age warehouse management system (WMS) enables seamless tracking, monitoring, processing, and shipping inventory. It ensures accuracy in picking stock and shipping it to the right customer within the promised time frame.
Inventory Management
Having a clear window to the entire inventory helps draw a logical working algorithm for a WMS. Furthermore, it enables placing the stock within the intended frame layout, allowing for an organized warehouse space. Therefore, efficient space management for inventory in the warehouse is highly critical and becomes a high priority for warehouse managers.
Further, an automated WMS provides a holistic picture to the warehouse staff about stocking inventory based on the demand and product weight from tracking to shipping. This process allows visibility if the end-to-end operations and enables easy and efficient tracking of inventory and order-related information such as lot details, expiry dates, etc.
A robust warehouse management system (WMS) helps quickly solve the inventory movement challenges, reducing additional costs, and improving customer experience with efficient order tracking and management.
Through higher accessibility to information, WMS empowers warehouse management with detailed data and reports at their fingertips.
Paper-less Inventory Documentation
So, when all communications, invoicing, and transactions are digitised, switching to paper-less inventory documentation is relevant. Legacy systems were highly dependent on manual data records, invoices, reports and other warehouse documentation that caused duplicity and error in the data processing.
A robust WMS can play a pivotal role in providing productive insights. Furthermore, warehouse management systems (WMS) offer essential business information accumulated as reports that provide deep insights to improve processes wherever required.
These reports are vital for managers managing the warehouse to help analyse the current wave of operations and locate the improvements on the highest priority to be adopted. A few of the essential managerial information a warehouse management system offers is giving out customer order data. A customer order data assists warehouse managers in forecasting and strategising business plans effectively.
Reporting & Analytics
The many advantages of a warehouse management system are to provide high accuracy reports and analytics data in real-time. With accurate reporting data provided in real-time from various sections of warehouse management systems, managers can configure improvements wherever needed and scale the business.
In addition, the significant advantage of WMS is the accuracy of data it provides to increase business revenue, diminishing excessive expenses. Therefore, it is essential to integrate a warehouse management system with advanced hardware and software programs.
Effective Labour Management
A warehouse management system analyses and assigns the tasks to the right personnel. It aids in managing and monitoring the staff responsibilities and task deployment for smooth operations at the warehouse.
One of the significant benefits of WMS is reducing the travel time within the warehouse and improving labour utilisation. Therefore, WMS can focus on the highest impact activities while finding the most well-suited labourer to perform a specific task.
The WMS can assign jobs daily and efficiently design schedules using a labour forecasting system. In addition, scanning items during their entry into a warehouse and throughout their movements can eliminate the extra checks, saving time and speeding up the recording process.
Enhanced Customer Service
Lastly, among the functions of the warehouse management system is enhancing customer service. A warehouse to run smoothly requires several skilled staff and a management team. WMS can monitor and analyse the performances of the warehouse staff. The display of real-time data of each employee performance level is vital for error-free warehouse operations.
WMS further contributes to staff management by making it easier for businesses to enhance employee productivity, formulate incentive policies, and eliminate workforce burnout issues.
Benefits of Warehouse Management System
Replacing your redundant legacy warehouse system with new-age WMS can benefit your warehouse operations. It can boost your bottom line while achieving customers retention and satisfaction. listed below are a few key advantages:
Fulfilment Process—Rapid implementation
Businesses need to upscale their operations strategy to stay ahead of the curve in a transformed global economy. Revamping the entire warehouse and supply chain system fast with a cloud-based system is the need of the hour.
The newage warehouse management systems (WMS) come with power-packed logistics solutions ready to integrate with multiple technology environments and systems to support complex, multichannel processes.
In addition, cloud technology eliminates access costs for hardware, software, and IT specialists to maintain the system. Instead, the solution is more advanced and adequate to handle end-to-end operations with a faster turnaround time while reducing cost.
Automated & Cloud-based WMS
Businesses get the advantage of being on top of technological advancements with an updated version of an automated and cloud-based WMS. Such solutions offerings by tech-service providers are available as software-as-a-service (SaaS), including regularly scheduled updates and no IT infrastructure costs.
Browntape has a warehouse management system geared for improving customer experience and aids thousands of eCommerce sellers across India.
Higher ROI and a Lower ToC
WMS solutions connect logistics processes that give higher ROI and lower total cost of ownership. The solution, subsequently, requires no hardware, software, and remote or onsite team setup.
In addition, WMS is designed to be ready for deployment in any tech environment, end to end, thereby reducing operational costs and increasing profit margins.
Scalability and Flexibility of Supply Chain Operations
Today’s global market demands speed. WMS offers scalability to adapt to changing market conditions, keeping the demand and supply in sync.
It eliminates all overhead capital expenditures for in-house hardware, software, and labour. So, you can invest scarce resources into your business—not your IT.
Conclusion
A technologically advanced and digitally enhanced Warehouse Management System (WMS) is changing how the logistics business is functioning. eCommerce businesses should eliminate legacy applications and avail WMS that are exclusively designed solutions for specific industries.
Because warehouse operations are complex and dynamic depending on the industry and each business needs, it’s crucial to have a thorough check to determine which solution suits your business needs. A WMS is an intuitive, adaptive, flexible and scalable solution with higher returns on investment and time and enhanced productivity.
Henceforth, to be ahead of the competition, businesses need to strategically allocate budgets for an advanced warehouse management system that will upscale your business instead of being a liability and operational hazard. WMS promises the best investment decision for any company, responsible for maximising their profit margins and future ROIs.
