Author: Paul Henriques in: Business Solutions
Quick Tips

Five Ways to Improve your Warehouse Management

September 13, 2021

Lately, supply chains have been bottled up with cargo moving at a snails pace through the world’s shipping centers. This added strain to business has led most manufacturers to smarten up their Warehouse Management Systems (WMS) to help keep production on schedule and ensure that orders are sent out on time.

But improving warehouse management is far from just ordering more of everything when you can or purchasing your vendor’s shelves clean once they finally have something in stock. Making your business ready for the unexpected peaks and valleys of your supply chain means knowing what you have and what you need based on projected demand. Recent research done by PwC has found that those firms with better warehouse management are better equipped to weather any supply chain disruptions.

You know that with LEAN, keeping your inventory reasonable is part of DOWNTIME. This ensures lower costs and higher efficiency and is a key component of your operations. However, changes to your vendor supply times may mean that you have to revise how much inventory you keep or how you process your orders.

OnRamp has helped it’s customers improve warehouse performance by implementing the following:

5 Ways to Improve Warehouse Management

1.    Review Lead Times

Review your vendor reports regularly to see who is having issues meeting your target times. If you have vendors that are constantly late with their shipments, update the lead times and order quantity for those parts to ensure that when you need them, they are readily available. This also works for items that are made or received quicker.

2.    Audit Shipping Processes

Review your picking, packing, and shipping processes every few months and apply PDCA to improve on any processes. By looking at the process every 60 to 90 days you can ensure that the process is running as designed and improve upon it where possible.

3.    Redefine Goals

When faced with supply chain uncertainties, instead of measuring your warehouse team KPI’s in inventory turns or accuracy, setup more achievable targets related to customer deliveries. Also, use reports, dashboards, and other methods, to prioritize orders as required to help meet shipping goals.

4.    Use Barcodes and Scanners

Switch to scanners and barcodes or RFID, if your ERP system supports it, to get a better immediate view of what’s in stock and when it arrives or leaves. Scanning bar codes and using a clone tag shipping process greatly decreases errors on the shop floor.

5.    Use EDI

Communicate with your customers and vendors via EDI to ensure orders are received and updated within your EDI-ready ERP system. EDI can help you reduce out-of-stocks and backorders.

Conclusion

While lates may have started to pile up, this doesn’t have to be the new normal. Clever management and proactively changing processes that you already have on the ground floor can help. While monitoring demand changes in what you sell is also required, improving your warehouse management processes can help stop-gap any future supply chain disruptions.

Better warehouse and inventory management will help:

  • Decrease errors
  • Improve inventory usage
  • Decrease inventory costs
  • Improve visibility and traceability
  • Improve order fulfillment speed and accuracy

Implementing an ERP system with a built-in WMS has proven to help ease supply chain woes by helping you better manage your inventory and your orders, giving you real-time control that leads to better decisions and better returns.

Author

  • Paul Henriques

    Paul Henriques is the current Manager for the Documentation and Training team at OnRamp Solutions Inc. Paul has over 15 years of experience in writing training material and documentation for various software companies. Having had to learn OnRamp ERP to better document it’s features and write training material; Paul is constantly stunned by the amount of thought that goes into each feature and the capabilities that are within the program, with features for all the various business units of a manufactory. Paul spends most of his free time keeping up to date on all the latest news and best practices for the manufacturing sector. Paul’s favorite manufacturing quote: “There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.” – Henry Ford

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