Warehouse managers don’t have it easy: they’re tasked with maintaining the most effective operations on a daily basis, and have to be careful about logistics, space, and budget. They must also always be on the lookout for new opportunities and ways to cut costs without cutting corners.
One way to ensure that your warehouse is always optimized for operational efficiency is to take advantage of Integrated Warehouse Management Software (IWMS). There are many types of IWMS, like Collective View IWMS Software, whose primary goal is to streamline your warehouse’s daily tasks.
Long gone are the days where these type of systems were geared only towards major corporations. Even small businesses and startups are using warehouse management software to meet growing depends, particularly in ecommerce. Consumers are now expecting their products fasters, and businesses are competing to manage quicker shipments. With IWMS, you’re able to manage all inventory in real-time and save money while doing so.
If you’re planning on getting your warehouse off the ground soon, or simply want to improve your current operational workflow, here’s what IWMS can do for you:
Cut Labor Expenses
Each stage of your workflow requires you to approach efficiency a bit differently. With integrated warehouse management software, you can properly allocate tasks automatically based on the system’s powerful decision-making. It bases its decisions off of data, ensuring you get the most optimized, smart answer each and every time.
You may also be able to track specific employee metrics, like items picked per time period and distance traveled. You can use this data to review your employees and better understand whether your staff needs training in a specific area and what you can do help them improve in the workplace. With access to greater information, it also saves your employees time on the warehouse floor. Additionally, thanks to improved shipment accuracy, you can greatly reduce the amount of returns. This is especially true if you hold date-restricted stock or perishable products.
Cost savings are about more than just about productivity and space, but facility usage as well. For example, because everything automated, you might get an alert that certain warehouse pockets are warmer than usual. Rather than notice too late, and potentially ruin product and equipment, you’d know right away and could fix the issue.
Lastly, consider this: your building’s physical systems, like lighting and plumbing, interact with your staff. With an integrated solution, you can see how the two work with another. This might allow you to discover how different departments can work across spaces without interrupting the flow of one another.
Improve Inventory Management
Every year, warehouses lose $1.1 trillion in inventory. Your warehouse requires reliable inventory records that are intuitive enough to help you improve your inventory turnover. With the right software, you can minimize your lead times and easily manage returns and multi-client orders.
With IWMS, you can greatly reduce your inventory loss percentage. Some solutions have much more power than just the ability to tell you where a product is located: it’s smart enough to evaluate a variety of factors (like quantity and unit of measure) to help you determine the best position for placement, and more.
Enhanced Customer Service
IWMS helps you improve the many relationships your warehouse has with different supply and demand clients, in addition to improving relationships with your end customers. The mistake that many warehouse managers make is handling customer relationships through different platforms.
When information is separated across tools, there’s no way to properly utilize it as a comprehensive data tool. For example, you might have a CRM to help you manage your external relationships, but this standalone software only handles a small portion of your overall needs. Customer response time can easily start to lag when you have to toggle between systems to find the information you need, which can easily result in missed opportunities.
Utilize Warehouse Space
You can improve your warehouse space by using a solution that can systematically locate products and make it much easier to receive, package, and ship. Space utilization is a major issue for many warehouses, especially those that are vast in size. The bigger the warehouse, the more trouble it will be to identify various gaps where space could be more properly utilized. When you don’t realize where space exists, you can’t use it to hold additional product, which means you lost out on profit.
Smaller warehouses suffer from a lack of space utilization, too. This is because they tend to cram product into the space, which quickly becomes disorganized and disoriented. The more unkempt the space is, the more difficult it will be to locate items in a timely manner. The money you might think you’re getting by bringing in an overage of product, you actually end up losing because of labor costs and increased shelf-to-truck times.