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No matter what business you are in, small and medium enterprises should have warehouses to keep their stocks and inventory. But many companies struggle against several common problems, which range from customer service to poor inventory management. In order to minimalize these long-existing problems, with the help of advanced technology, Warehouse Management System (WMS) has been developed to help counteract these problems.

What is a Warehouse Management System (WMS)?

A Warehouse Management System (WMS) is a software application that functions to facilitate all everyday operations that are related to the warehouse. For instance, monitoring inventory level as well as keep track of the stock location, from the time the stock is loaded until it is shipped to the intended destination. Not only that, some advanced WMS can also track inventory all the way from manufacturing lines or suppliers.

A WMS can benefit you in a few ways:

Reduce Human Mistakes

With the help of WMS, the inventory is categorized properly, as a result, pickers know where exactly to look for the items during picking. Additionally, by affixing barcodes on each item, the rate of mistakenly picking wrong items can also be dramatically reduced.

Improve Customer Experience

It is important to understand consumer behavior. Nowadays, people look for timely updates, impeccable services and expect things to get done quickly. As stated beforehand, WMS decreases human errors, and therefore the chances of customers receiving wrong or insufficient items are greatly reduced, consequently reducing the amount of customer complaints. Also, by incorporating WMS, the average picking time is shorten, hence providing faster service to customers. Moreover, as the entire processes that cover order to delivery are streamlined and centralized by WMS, customers can get real time update on their delivery status, such as when their orders are done packing or area ready to be delivered. Overall, these enhanced experiences may increase customer satisfactions.

Save on Warehouse Spaces

When your inventory is properly planned and zoned, you not only can save on warehouse spaces, your staff can also locate items with ease without wasting more time.

Increase Productivity

As mentioned in the last point, a properly zoned warehouse can save non-value added time and unnecessary movement. Moreover, when the entire order fulfillment processes are digitalized and integrated nicely, workers can push out more tasks in the same amount of time, compared to when the processes are done in the traditional way. This is due to a modern system can eliminates outdated processes that takes up more resources and time.

Collect Data with Ease

When you are using WMS to carry out your order processing, data such as average picking time, daily picking rate and so forth can be collected. Having this up to date data information enables you to analyze your processes and productivity, as a result you are able to make continuous improvement to further enhance your processes. Furthermore, having this data can also let you make better decision.

Conclusion: Finding A Suitable WMS

Oftentimes, WMS comes in a standard and complete structure that might not be suitable for small and medium enterprises. Therefore, it is better to look for a customizable WMS that caters exactly to your needs, depending on the size of your enterprise and the challenges you face.

At Keyway Technologies, instead of pushing you a product you cannot fully utilize, we believe in prioritizing your needs. Let us know the challenges you face in terms of warehousing and order processing, we’ll see how we can help you.