Warehouse Inventory Control Management Systems
Your business is growing. You just leased a secondary warehouse down the street from your current location. Your warehouse manager has filled every crack and crevice in your current warehouse and you hope the new space will relieve some of the pressure caused by fulfillment delays, inventory shortages, and even damage cause by poor packing.
Warehouse Inventory Control Management Systems, or WMS, are designed to help the warehouse facility, vendors, and even customers stay on top of inventory status in real time. Suppose you know an order for widgets is coming in next week. That doesn’t bother you be cause the manual inventory that was run last month shows more than enough product is on hand to fulfill that order.
What you may not have remembered is that the inventory you were counting on was destroyed in a roof leak and removed from the warehouse. Had warehouse inventory management systems been put in place, you would have seen an up to the minute report of the exact inventory status and even the location of the destroyed inventory waiting to be disposed of.
With the development of micro computing devices like RFID tags, mangers are able to keep track of vital warehousing information in real time. Whether you want to track the movement of whole pallets of product, or the individual item, a WMS may be the answer.
Since these systems are computer based, it is important to work closely with your IT manager to insure proper implementation. These systems can be based on your company’s network or be internet based. Taking time to do a careful survey of needs of all systems in you product stream can prevent costly mistakes in the future. These systems can often pay for themselves in a reasonable amount of time.
Another key person to include in the development of these systems is the warehouse manager. These personnel understand critical product flows and inefficiencies within the plant. When expanding to supplementary warehouse space, employees must often do extra work in compiling orders from both facilities due to poorly created pick procedures.
Warehouse management systems can give the operator a birds eye view of the products flowing in and out of their warehouses. These computerized systems can show quickly areas of weakness that could be costing the company millions in lost product and high man hours.
Companies that implement computerized inventory management systems find they save a significant amount of money in loss prevention and man hours. These systems are necessary for just in time suppliers meeting customer requirements and fulfillment houses providing responsive processing for their clients. Knowing where your inventory is within your warehouses, both local and remote, is essential for maintaining a successful flow of product from the manufacturers floor, through the warehouse, and on to the seller and consumer.
By bringing together members from each specialty in the supply chain, companies can develop a dependable system that will enable them to quickly meet their customer’s needs and expand operations efficiently.