(Newswire.net — June 16, 2020) — Ecommerce industry is at its peak today with more and more businesses choosing to move their offline stores to online ecommerce websites. With this, there has been a big jump in demand for warehouses required to store the products. 

A warehouse management system is the cornerstone of warehouse logistics. It would be best if you had warehouse management software to manage complex tasks along with the right balance in supply chain warehouses. Let’s see what WMS is, its types, and the key features.

What is Warehouse Management Software?

Warehouse management software is a tool that helps you manage and control the day to day operations in a warehouse. It guides the inventory sorting and regulates the picking and shipping of orders. To meet customer needs, businesses need to respond quickly and warehouse management systems act as a saving grace.

Types of WMS available

Standalone

Standalone is the ideal management tool that is implemented on-premise on your business’s native hardware and network. Most available third party WMS systems that are standalone type must be integrated with the rest of your enterprise tools such as an ERP system. While integration works most of the time in these systems, problems such as duplication of data, information delays, interface issues, and customization expenses still exist.

These systems are often least preferred for long term applications, and they also lack the benefits of a properly integrated WMS option.

ERP modules

Some ERP vendors offer an option to integrate the warehouse management system as a module into their ERP tool. This type of solution provides the embedded accounting tools, sales orders, MRP, and shipping management with non-messy real-time interfaces that run smoothly without any hiccups.

Cloud-based

Cloud-based solutions are trending today, and they are offered as web-based software service solutions (SaaS)

Compared to the standalone solutions, the cloud-based solution are much easier to set up, cost less, and are easy to upgrade over time. As everything is stored in the cloud, there is no extra space required for storing the data, and a lot of space is saved, resulting in less maintenance. It also can receive all the necessary software upgrades over the air, with the latest computing features. These solutions are very popular and have a wide scope of applications, from commercial to civic. For example, it can be used by the police as evidence management software and for a variety of other uses

Key features of WMS

Warehouse designing

Logistics is essential in warehousing, and it ensures additional storage and optimized memory allocation. It can enable you to design the workflow and handle all possible variations in seasonal inventory.

Real-time capabilities

With an advanced warehouse management tool, businesses obtain real-time information. The warehouse tool can be integrated with other productivity hardware and tools to improve efficiency and accuracy further.

Picking process

The warehouse management system has a considerable influence on the productivity of the supply chain, and that is because of its picking process. Using better functions such as wave picking, zone picking, batch picking, and other services, the warehouse workers can perform the pick-and-packing task.

The packaging process is now much more efficient as the modern 3PI logistics companies can package all your inventory to ship to different customers even if they belong to the same brand.

Receiving and shipping

Using a warehouse management tool, you can now ensure that the receiving and shipping processes run smoothly on a day to day basis. Using the software, you can quickly identify and filter the received items based on their categories. The data is then stored electronically and transferred to the ERP database when required. 

So you can now avoid any manual method of registration in terms of when the shipment was picked up and delivered. The employees can also be using their access to perform the data entry of the order shipped or received with minimal error and accountability.

Inventory tracking

All the leading warehouse systems include RFID or AIDC barcode scanners to track the available inventory to save time and effort. It means that you can adequately track and log all the inbound and outbound stock and others affecting the inventory. This feature helps you save time and effort where you’ll do all the inventory tracking using the warehouse management tool instead of traditional manual monitoring.  

Labor management

Warehouse management software also comes with a feature that lets you monitor your warehouse workers. The data and insights generated from the tool are crucial to improving the performance of warehouse workers.

The logistics companies then come up with incentive and training programs will enable their workers to learn new skills and improve their productivity.

Customized reporting

The manager needs to know that the workers meet all the required regulatory compliances throughout the supply chain cycle. The report generation feature enables the managers to analyze the performance of the warehouse and monitor all operations. It becomes easy to find the areas of improvement as the managers can now see the areas of improvement using the shipping records generated from the customers buying history. Even most open source warehouse management tools offer this feature.