Warehouse efficiency is a hot topic among managers who want to improve their productivity and profits. In an effort to increase efficiency, managers often focus their attention on speed, finding ways to make their team move faster. Inevitably, accuracy suffers, and any efficiency gains are quickly lost as your team has to go back and re-do sub-par work. A Warehouse Management System (WMS) actually helps improve your efficiency simply by improving and maintaining accuracy. The gains you make in accuracy provide a number of inherent bonuses to your efficiency without forcing your team members to just move faster.
Directed Put Away and Picking
Warehouse Management Systems provide visible and immediate improvements in warehouse accuracy at both the put away and picking stages. Using handheld barcode (or even RFID) scanners, your team members will know exactly which locations to place items in and pull them from. During picking, they will also be directed to specific groups of products in order to maintain FIFO. This serves your efficiency by ensuring that products are not misplaced, thereby initiating a search to fill an order, and that orders are filled with the correct items every time. The system automatically flags any signs of scanning errors for review, which provides an extra layer of accuracy.
Cycle Counting
Warehouse Management Systems also allow you to transition from performing physical inventories to a cycle count inventory strategy. This allows your team members to conduct rolling spot checks on inventory based on the relative value of each product rather than stopping all productivity to do a complete warehouse count all at once. With this system, the most valuable items will be counted up to six or twelve times per year, and the least valuable items will be checked only once or twice a year. This ensures that the most valuable items are always accurate and that any errors are caught before they become a major problem down the road. Additionally, it is easier to maintain accuracy throughout the year using cycle counts.
Warehouse efficiency is directly related to the accuracy of every step in your process. Any time you leave yourself open to accuracy errors, you face the possibility of redoing work, receiving customer complaints, refunding sales and having to restock items that have already left your warehouse once. The reality is that eliminating accuracy errors alone offers major gains in efficiency all on its own, and once you have achieved accuracy, maintaining it long term gets easier, allowing you to turn your attention to speed and improving warehouse efficiency in other ways.
