Warehouse management software is one of those things businesses consider to be a nice-to-have add on to their software needs. In some cases with smaller warehouses or limited inventory diversity, it may be accurate to call it that: nice-to-have. However, depending on your business’ warehousing factors, that perceived nice-to-have is actually a need-to-have. Consider the following factors that could (and maybe should) affect your consideration:
- Costs of inaccuracies
- Customer goodwill
- Time of workers to correct mistakes
- Freight
- Inventory replacement/lost inventory
- Efficiency
- Saved time during picking/put away
- Optimized routes for pathing and location-based picking
- Less “back and forth” time by employees looking for items
- Greater safeguards to ensure accuracy
- Labeling and barcoding for scanning at each stage of the order fulfillment process
- Inventory overview
- Increased inventory on hand visibility
- More explicit location (and maybe bin/rack) based physical and cycle counts
- Full end to end supply chain visibility
- Customer Relations
- On-demand order timeline visibility from on hand projections
- Automated notifications of order fulfillment
- “Consignment” type inventory storage with at-a-glance numbers
This is by no means a comprehensive list. Warehouse management tools can be a deeply robust set of features that can transform your business. I considered making each of these points a paragraph, but the beauty of WMS is that it is designed to work for you.
Rather than read more of the generic hypotheticals, we would love to schedule a free consultation with you to help you discover how your business could specifically benefit. By learning your constraints with inventory, we can help give real world solutions and plans to mitigate these constraints.