Warehouse Management (WMS)

A full view in real-time

Complete operation visibility

Get a clear, real-time view of every operation, from stock levels, staff workloads and incoming deliveries to outstanding purchase orders, allocations and despatch. Gain full integration with third-party courier systems, other existing ERP systems, and a wide range of software.

With one solution, see all your departments benefit from this clarity, and let your operations truly flow together.

Demanding more from your inventory

Total stock control

Achieve a full and detailed record of your stock and sales data. Simplify allocation tasks, transfers and stock takes while increasing order fulfilment, whether working within a single warehouse or across a larger organisation.

As you gain control of your stock operations, intelligent forecasting and reporting will ensure you order the right stock quantities for your demands. Across your business, our stock control capabilities allow you to make the best use of your resources, so you can fulfil orders accurately and on time.

Achieve more, with time to spare

Automated paperless tasks

Remove the need for manual processes, as handheld terminals (HHTs) use a single scan to book-in, trace and verify stock, maximising both your accuracy and productivity. Goods in and returns can be processed quickly, and picks are automatically allocated with pick rules and completed using the most efficient walk routes in your warehouse.

Tasks are grouped together to boost productivity while reducing associated costs. With full connectivity across your warehouse, transactions are completed instantly with ease, and there is no data rekeying to slow your business down.

Take a step further into the future of warehouse automation with our Warehouse Robotics offering through our sister company, OW Robotics. Be at the cutting-edge of warehouse automation with robotics systems proven to significantly reduce costs and maximise fulfilment rates.

Get a fast ROI and add a sense of prestige to your warehouse – helping you to stand out from the competition.

The best warehouse management systems lets you see everything. Whether you need to know ongoing staff workloads, the ETA of incoming deliveries, or the current number of outstanding purchase orders. Your warehouse management software should be able to tell you all this and more whenever you need to know.

With the fullest possible picture, your employees can make the best possible day-to-day choices, and you can make the optimal overall strategic decisions. With real-time operational visibility as an option, you can see issues as they develop, understand situations as they unfold, and watch your responses take effect as they come into play. With complete visibility, you know that you are using the very best warehouse management software available.

Keeping your stock under proper control is a key component of the very best warehouse management software available. It means stock availability is clearly known, that all industry compliance procedures are in place, and lets you see what is and isn’t in high demand in specific moments, giving you an extra angle on some highly valuable market intelligence.

The processes of keeping track of stock are always vitally important, but if they have to be done at the expense of ongoing workflow, they become a dangerously disruptive. The best warehouse management software integrates stock control as part of your system, making sure your company stays on top of everything without slowing down.

With accurate alerts about low or lowering stock levels, intelligent forecasting about ongoing and upcoming trends, and a simplified system of transfers, allocations, and bulk orders – your business can respond to changing situations much faster and far more reliably. Exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from the best warehouse management software.

The best warehouse management software keeps your operational accuracy ratings high. The more errors you have, the more time are lost to returns processing, and the more customers are lost as they begin to perceive your business as unreliable. To make mistakes much rarer, the window of opportunity for manual error must be shrunk. Data needs to transfer quickly and seamlessly, with little to no chance of ever being misread or misinterpreted. To accomplish this, you need to go paperless.

Hand-held terminal (HHT) technology in warehouses dramatically reduces the probability of human error. Scanning barcodes will always be more accurate than reading and writing a number, or listening to someone shout them out throughout the warehouse. Combined with the ability of this technology to redirect staff into more efficient picking patterns, regroup tasks for optimal order processing, and keep better records of operational effectiveness, it becomes clear to see why HHTs are so game-changing. To keep your business at the forefront of the cutting edge, make sure your warehouse management software can make use of HHTs and other paperless processing technology.

Effective warehouse operations are integral to business success through maintaining adequate stock levels and prompt fulfilment of orders, leading to customer satisfaction, loyalty, repeat business and profitability.

Businesses are therefore constantly striving to improve the efficiency of their warehouse operations and overall productivity of staff. For these reasons, it is imperative that businesses have robust and effective stock control and warehouse management systems (WMS) in place.

However, there are a plethora of systems available, ranging from all-in-one, end-to-end ERP systems with integrated WMS functionality, to a range of bolt-on WMS packages that can be added to existing business management software. So which option should businesses opt for?

Affective WMS fits into all aspects of the supply chain. And can help provide control, flexibility and visibility over all operations at each stage of the supply chain.

WMS however, can also be specifically incorporated into just one part of the supply chain, for example an online retailer may have a shorter supply chain to that of a physical store or may only need controls for stock management for example.

WMS software is an application that helps control and manage the day-to-day operations in a warehouse. WMS software guides inventory receiving and put-away, optimises picking and shipping of orders and advises on inventory replenishment.

WMS is a standalone system that needs support from other software systems for example ERP. ERP for is an all encompassing system which aids the control and management of many aspects of the business for example; accounting, procurement, project management, risk management, staffing and compliance.
A WMS system is typically connected with an ERP system, but not always. Considering factors such as business type and size.

It is likely that your warehouse is the central hub of your business, where goods arrive, stock is managed and orders are despatched to customers. With this being the case it is vitally important that you have the right processes in place that ensures your staff are working as accurately and as efficiently as possible on a daily basis.

• Importance of warehouse layout
• Benefits of barcode scanning technology in the warehouse
• Ways to get staff working productively.

For many companies, effective warehouse management is at the very heart of all business operations.

Orders require quick fulfilment with accurate stock levels maintained so that sales can be capitalised, high service levels achieved and increased revenue generated. Businesses are therefore constantly striving to improve the efficiency of warehouse tasks and overall productivity of staff in order for this to be achieved, looking to implement ways to help better manage their day to-day warehouse activities.

With these measures and processes having varying degrees of success, we thought we’d take a look at the key things that we have found are proven to help businesses enhance their daily warehouse operations.

It main seem obvious but often half the battle of achieving effective warehouse management comes down to how a business lays out their warehouse.

Often companies will lay out their stock within their premises with little consideration as to how this will impact on the performance of common warehouse activities. Properly structuring your warehouse requires careful planning and preparatory work in order to ensure it is rightfully set up for fast processes and turnaround. Not all businesses have the required level of knowledge, experience and resource internally to identify how a warehouse should be configured, so if this is true in your case why not speak to someone with expertise to gain advice and help with best practices. Your first port of call for this should always be your software provider as they may offer a warehouse set up service which will help you to avoid paying external consultants for guidance. Speak to them and see if they are able to assist in how best to layout racking, bins, position stock and manage processes like picking and stock put away. By catering this to the shape of your premises and way of working, you will be able to see immediate efficiency results.

With barcode scanning now such an integral part of modern day warehouse operations across the globe, it is incredible to think that there are still some businesses relying on paper notes within their warehouse in order to perform tasks.

Paper notes are renowned for being highly unreliable, often riddled with inaccuracies or lost during transfer through the warehouse causing efficiency to drop. Solving this issue, barcode scanning enables businesses to increase accuracy and streamline tasks to ensure that a higher level of productivity is achieved through quicker data entry and the ability to pick multiple orders simultaneously.

This has resulted in many companies striving for paperless warehouse environments where tasks are performed and information is seamlessly transferred through mobile barcode scanning devices. However as barcode scanning continues to evolve, there are now more enhanced ways for businesses to use barcode scanning technology, with this evolution driven by GS1. GS1 are global leaders in providing supply and demand chain barcoding standards across a wide range of business sectors.

Currently GS1 barcodes, which can come in a 1D or 2D format, are used by over two million companies around the world including major retailers, popular online marketplaces, food service operators and healthcare organisations. These include high profile names such as the NHS, Boots, Coca-Cola Enterprises, Morrisons, Nestle and Tesco.

The reason for many of these major companies turning to GS1 barcodes is down to the accurate recording of product traceability and major efficiency benefits the use of these barcodes is able to provide. These encoded barcodes allow several different fields of data to be instantly transferred into a device with a single scan, including a product’s EAN codes, Batch Numbers, Expiry Dates, quantities and more. By using these GS1 barcodes alongside compatible mobile devices, your business can not only benefit from accurate data transfer through paperless management but also much greater efficiency in task performance.

Your warehouse is essentially the central hub for your business, with the purchasing, selling, despatching and ongoing management of goods all passing through your warehouse.

For many businesses suffering from inaccuracies and inefficiencies within their stock management and despatch processes, the source of these problems can often come down to how information is transferred down from sales and other departments, through to picking staff and out to couriers.

Even if measures are in place to ensure stock control and warehouse processes are kept both accurate and streamlined, this can all be undone at either end if integration with your other departments, sales channels and courier providers aren’t in place, relying on manual transposition of data to get the information over to the right people.

Therefore when looking at systems that will improve warehouse management, you should be looking carefully at solutions that offer full integration with other key areas within your business. By linking your warehouse operations to all of your sales channels, purchasing systems, chosen couriers and other key business areas, you can ensure stock levels are kept up to date and consistent company wide with vital information always seamlessly transferred.

Although having systems in place that drive effective warehouse management and task performance is important, equally as important is having procedures that drive the productivity of staff.

Tying into having a warehouse correctly laid out, your business should firstly be looking at ways to direct staff around the warehouse using the most efficient walk routes based on the task being performed and the proximity between the bins being visited. By doing this, you can ensure that staff travel time is kept to a minimum as they navigate across the warehouse. However in order to drive out any further inefficiencies, it is also important for staff performance to be carefully monitored.

The best way to achieve this is by recording the time taken for staff to complete certain tasks and then analysing this information. This will enable your business to set average times that staff can strive to achieve and allow you to track how staff are performing against these target times. This ensures consistent staff performance and helps speed to be fully optimised.

Aside from determining the direction and the speed in which staff travel across the warehouse, the best way to get the most out of staff is to think about how tasks and picks are assigned. If one of your warehouse staff is driving a fork lift, utilise this and assign them larger or heavier picks. If a member of staff is travelling with a trolley, delegate more picks to them and allow them to collect multiple picks at once.

Although even further efficiency benefits can be gained from using a system that is able to automate this process, at the very least you should be using these tools to your advantage and thinking about how carefully assigning tasks to staff in the right way can lead to greater warehouse productivity.

Although one of the most essential parts of any successful business, many companies will struggle to achieve accurate forecasting for key periods within their calendar year.

With many businesses importing goods from overseas suppliers with lead times of several months it can be difficult for companies to ensure that the stock they order now is what they need by the time the stock arrives later on in the year. As a result, companies often have to settle for unreliable estimates, trying to gauge how much stock is needed based on past experience, performance of similar items and simple gut feeling.

If this sounds like you and you find yourself leaving this invaluable information to chance, your company will soon find your warehouse quickly becoming short on space and harder to manage due overstocking. Costs can then start to add up and profitability fall because of money being wasted on stock that will never be sold.

Therefore it is vitally important to effective stock management to have a means of accurately and automatically calculating what stock is required, when it is needed for and in what quantities. In order to do this correctly, all factors will need to be considered such as previous sales history, supplier lead times, upcoming promotions and the seasonality of certain items. Armed with an accurate, efficient method of determining this information and what stock is needed, you will find your warehouse much more manageable, customer demand able to be fulfilled on time and cash flow no longer tied up in wasted overstocking.