How Can Warehouse Management Systems Boost Your Business?

Warehouse management is a crucial aspect of any manufacturing business, whether you need to store and utilise raw materials and components or store finished products ready for distribution. However, warehouses are complex environments and can create waste and inefficiencies when they are poorly organised. 

With the latest warehouse management system, you can create rational, efficient storage solutions that allow you to maintain your production processes and easily change production methods when needed. It can deliver huge benefits to small and medium sized manufacturing businesses. Here’s how.

Use Warehouse Management Systems to Maintain Optimum Stock Levels

Maintaining optimum stock levels is a delicate balancing act, unless you have the right tools. With the right warehouse management system, you can keep track of stock levels with extraordinary precision. Every component, screw or panel is logged and easy to locate, and you can instantly see if stock levels are low or levels are becoming excessive.

Keep Your Costs Under Control

Inefficient warehouse management doesn’t just impact upon the quality of your products and customer service, it is also expensive. As you may be spending money on machinery, space, tools and materials that you don’t need.

Unless you have a system in place to model your costs, you will never know for sure how much you are spending on warehousing operations. With a warehouse management system, your costs can be tracked and modelled to a high degree of accuracy, and you can see at a glance when they are increasing.

Introduce New Products Smoothly With Warehouse Management System

When a new product is introduced to your production line, warehousing becomes a crucial consideration. New products require completely new resource chains. Without the right amount and type of components, the whole chain can break down, resulting in delays and defective results.

Warehouse management systems can make introducing new products so much easier. You can automatically request exactly the right variety of materials and components and track them all the way through the ordering, delivery and production process.

It Can Help Increase Employee Efficiency

Warehouse management systems include sophisticated barcode scanning tools that log every item as it enters your warehouses and maintains a location record from that point onwards. This enables your warehouse staff to maintain a well-organised, efficient storage space that can be changed very quickly when required.

Many also include more effective order picking equipment, and allows staff to carry out quality audits rapidly and effectively. Wireless communication tools also keep shop-floor staff in continuous contact with operations, enabling staff to report any issues as they arise.

Improve Your Traceability

When you are seeking to comply with relevant government regulations or industry standards, traceability is vital. The same applies when you are trying to create effective quality control systems.

Being able to trace every product back to its source is also good for modelling both financial and environmental costs. With warehouse management systems, you can track everything from the moment it enters your facilities to the point of delivery to clients or retail sites.

If you want to reorganise your storage systems, warehouse management system are a great way to do so. Find out how they can be implemented at your sites by getting in contact with the ERP experts at WinMan.

All warehouses need to contain enough raw materials and components to manufacture the required amount of finished products. However, money can easily be spent on materials that will never be used, with negative results for your bottom line. On the other hand, if stock levels are too low, you risk not having sufficient materials to meet customer demand.