WMS brings benefits to the entire company
Don’t you have a warehouse management system (WMS) yet? Read more about the benefits of this solution. Flows of materials, components or products still work in many companies on the principle of circulation of paperwork or stocking sheets, identification of locations is done by verbal description of the goods, etc. This kind of system can be quite reliable for a long time in small warehouses with a limited number of articles. However, if the number of articles, locations or simply the volume of goods grows, it’s necessary to use a more effective solution for warehouse management.
The companies, which don’t use WMS, have so many hidden costs and responsible employees can’t easily reveal that. Try to ask your warehousekeepers how much time are they spending by searching for goods and you will be really surprised.
Implementation of WMS brings benefits to the entire company. It means “calming” for the company. Everyone can rely on equal information, because what is physically in stock is also in the system. For the proper functioning of warehouse and warehouse processes is necessary to know the exact location of any unit in the warehouse at the real time. Otherwise, there could be a big problem, because pickers would be not able to find the goods in the warehouse or the goods for customers can be incorrectly picked.
The biggest advantage of deploying WMS is that the company produces and ships more goods with the same costs, the same number of employees and the same space of storage. In general the companies using WMS are doing well at the market. The companies are growing and have no longer need to manage material flows by papers, excels and information that people just hold in their heads.
Do you think that WMS is not suitable for your company? There are some reasons, which can show you the opposite. Every company wants to have an overview of the flow in the warehouse for optimizing the processes and find the hidden costs in the stocks. The price of WMS can be few thousands of euros, but the return of investment could be from 6 to 18 months and there is also cloud solution with no bigger investment needed, just certain monthly fee. So nowadays every company can afford some warehouse management system.
If the company decides to buy a WMS system, they need to have a complex analysis to find out the most suitable WMS system. Implementation of warehouse management system is complex process with possibilities of changing processes in the warehouse and companies are not able to do that.
The latest trend in the WMS is combination of an optimal number of different technologies communicating together, for example concept that doesn’t send the picker to the goods, but brings the goods to the picker. From the most common technologies we can mention automatic stackers, conveyors, handling equipment, racks, Pick by Light, Pick by Voice, RFID. The future possibilities included integrations of the entire supply chain system. Companies are trying to find the best and the fastest way of communication with their suppliers. It is necessary to share information with them, for example by portal solutions. Suppliers are able to deliver more often in smaller batches and provide order status information or mark the goods with labels for customer internal use.
Predictions for the WMS are great, because just upward trend is expected. New technologies have an increasing trend at all and warehouses aren’t exception. Warehouses will be forced to switch from paperwork to the electronic systems.