It’s not impossible to achieve supply chain efficiency without effective warehouse management, but it’s not easy. Your warehouse is often the heart of your operations, facilitating the flow of goods, parts, and merchandise between vendors and your customers.
Challenges in warehouse management can throw a wrench into your whole operation by delaying or complicating shipments. The right technology can greatly improve your warehouse efficiency. Let’s explore how.
Current Challenges in Warehouse Management
Overcoming supply chain challenges with warehouse management software starts by understanding your specific issues. Maybe you’re experiencing one of these common challenges.
Inefficient Use of Space
Without a solid warehouse management plan, you may be using space inefficiently. You could be stacking items based on weight or another system, leaving unused vertical space or cutting down on storage capacity.
Poor Inventory Management
Poor space planning can make your workers less productive because they have to circulate the warehouse to find different items for each order. It also makes it harder for you to track your inventory. Poor inventory management increases your chances of running out of inventory or paying excess carrying costs for unsold items.
Improper Demand Forecasting
Failing to plan for seasonal fluctuations is another common warehouse management challenge. If you’re not analyzing historical data to see patterns in buyer behavior and customer demands, you might order the same inventory as usual. This could leave you scrambling to fill an influx of seasonal orders.
Compliance With Safety Regulations
All of these challenges can lead to compliance issues with safety regulations. Without a warehouse management system, your employees risk injuries from falling objects, hazardous equipment, and dangerous materials. Putting a system in place keeps everything organized while outlining protocols for machinery, chemicals, and other dangerous elements in your warehouse.
Technological Solutions for Warehouse Management
As technology improves, it offers more capabilities to streamline warehouse management.
Warehouse Management Systems
A robust platform helps you oversee every aspect of your warehouse from inventory to employee productivity, even if you’re using 3PL warehouse management. These systems automate parts of your process, such as routing purchase orders from your sales team to your warehouse instantly. They can also monitor real-time inventory levels and automatically place an order when your inventory dips below a critical level.
Real-Time Data Access
With the right mix of technology, real-time data is not limited to inventory management. Yes, real-time insights help you make accurate demand forecasts and anticipate seasonal demand. But you can also optimize your storage space and make it easier for employees to move throughout the warehouse.
Real-time data also helps you monitor how your suppliers and vendors are performing. You can anticipate potential delays and bottlenecks and plan for them.
With RFID (radio frequency identification) tags, the Internet of Things (IoT), and other technology, you can track inventory from your supplier to your customer. Monitoring a shipment from start to finish from each supplier helps you set realistic customer expectations.
Increased Supply Chain Efficiency
Automation, data insights, and real-time location tracking make your warehouse operate like a machine. Automated inventory tracking and purchase order management reduce human error. You’ll fulfill orders faster with the correct merchandise, and your customers will be happy.
Accurate inventory management and tracking prepare you for current and future customer orders. You lessen your risk of running out of crucial inventory during busy seasons, which also improves customer satisfaction.
Overcoming Implementation Hurdles
Although you can manage these and other challenges with warehouse management software, you still need to choose the right system and implement it. Warehouse management software can be expensive. You have to pay for the system and the time it takes to integrate your data and train your team.
Speaking of integrating data, when choosing a system, you need one that operates with your existing software. If your warehouse management system doesn’t talk to your inventory management software, for example, you can’t use it to its full potential. Mitigate this challenge by choosing a system that works with the software you use every day.
Resistance to change is another common implementation hurdle. Some of your employees may be uncomfortable with technology. Others may think that automation means you’re replacing them. To address some of this resistance early, involve your employees in the selection process.
Outline how the new management system will improve their work life. Poll your workers in the planning process and ask them what they would like to improve in their daily workflow. Bringing your team on board early helps them understand why you’re changing their systems and makes them more likely to support the new system.
Once you’ve chosen a system, train your employees in clusters. Figure out who is best at technology and train them first. They can pick up the new system while others work on the old one. Your tech-savvy employees can also train the next batch of people until everyone is trained.
Future Trends in Warehouse Management Technology
Tech is a fast-paced industry, and warehouse management is improving with the rest of the technology sector. IoT technology gives you real-time tracking data and helps you with warehouse planning. Sensors transmit an item’s location in real time and send it to your warehouse management system.
Many supply chain businesses are also using blockchain for inventory management. A blockchain is simply a digital ledger of transactions linked through a network. With blockchain, your inventory levels are updated as soon as a customer places an order. You get better visibility with purchase orders, and your customers can track their order as soon as they place it.
Warehouse management systems using artificial intelligence (AI) employ machine learning to identify patterns in your data. These systems can track your order volume and history over time to produce analytics and insights for inventory planning, warehouse management, and even route planning. You can also train these systems using historical data and industry insights if you don’t want to wait for them to analyze current transactions to find patterns.
Many warehouse management systems run on the cloud, so you and your team have access to the same data in real time. Rather than having your customer service and inventory management platforms on separate servers, each team is working with the same information, which makes warehouse management more effective.
If you’re ready to tackle your warehouse management challenges, Surgere has you covered. We offer multiple supply chain solutions using the latest technology to enhance your operations. Contact us today to learn more about how you can improve your customer service through warehouse management.
