Warehouse Management
Warehouse management and distribution logistics involve the physical warehouse where products are stored, as well as the receipt and movement of goods takes place. Warehouse management aims to control the storage and movement of products and materials within a warehouse. These operations include the receipting of inwards goods, tracking, stacking and stock movement through the warehouse.
Warehouse management and distribution logistics involve the physical warehouse where products are stored, as well as the receipt and movement of goods takes place. Warehouse management aims to control the storage and movement of products and materials within a warehouse. These operations include the receipting of inwards goods, tracking, stacking and stock movement through the warehouse. Warehouse management is also responsible for ensuring shelving or pallet racking is in place to secure the stock, maintaining the quality of goods while in storage and until they are shipped out of the warehouse. The warehouse is the core of inventory management where all goods are received, sent to stores or shipped out and delivered to customers. Warehouse management isn’t so much about space as it is how to effectively use that space.
Warehouse Management Costs
All companies with warehouses incur cost that would depend on various components like order volume, storage time and fulfillment type. However, it’s good to know what are common warehousing costs so that you know how to budget for warehouse services. Generally warehouses expenses include costs incurred on handling and moving product in or out of the warehouse, costs associated with the equipment used to handle product, cost of fuel or electricity to power the equipment, rent and storage expenses, costs on operations administration and administrative expenses.
Given below is a snapshot of various cost components that you will often see in warehousing operations:
- Employment (wages, benefits, compensation, training etc.)
- Storage (rent, depreciation, interest, local taxes etc.)
- Material handling (fork lift trucks, pallets, packaging etc.)
- Utilities (electricity, heat etc.)
- Communication (Internet, telephone systems etc.)
- Administration (management, insurance, security etc.)
Warehouse Management Systems
Knowing how much inventory you need is important, but equally important is knowing where that inventory is. The system or software application that manages these operations is known as a warehouse management system (WMS). WMS programs allow for centralized management of warehouse management processes, such as inventory tracking and stock locations. A warehouse execution system (WES) coordinates all of the processes that take place inside a warehouse or distribution center, including material handling equipment, devices, inventory management, and employees. A warehouse management system (WMS) controls, manages, and regulates the movement of goods within a warehouse or distribution center. Typical features of a WMS include inventory management, picking and putaway, order visibility, and fulfillment.
Current warehouse operations can be so complex in a multi-divisional organization operating through multiple channels, that they require a dedicated team to run them. All warehousing aspects must be streamlined to ensure that customers get their orders on time. The key to successfully managing multiple warehouses is to get a good understanding of the warehousing concepts and modern best practices. This will help you to identify challenges in warehousing operations for your business and develop strategies to overcome them.
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Inventory is money, and hence businesses need to perform physical inventory counts periodically to make sure that their inventory records are accurate. The traditional approach to conducting inventory counts is to shut down a facility during a slow time of year to count everything, one item at a time. This process is slow, expensive, and (unfortunately) not very accurate.
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Types of Order Picking Methods in the Warehouse
There are many different types of picking in a warehouse and each one works as a customized solution for each business. Depending on the size of your warehouse and inventory, the manpower you have on hand, and the number of customer orders made each day, there may be certain methods that are more efficient for you than others.
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At a high level, the essential elements in a warehouse are an arrival bay, a storage area, a departure bay, a material handling system and an information management system. As part of the process for enabling a warehouse layout, you must define warehouse zone groups, and zones, location types, and locations.
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To stay competitive in today’s tough market, the location of your warehouse is vital. To grow retail business need to offer to customers faster and affordable shipping time, which is dependent on the warehousing location as the location of the warehouse affects the transit time to ship orders to customers.
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Transport operations are often divided into full load and part load and due to economies of scale, the unit costs are higher for part loads. Our customer needs several part loads delivering, so it can reduce costs by consolidating these into full loads. Then it gets all the part loads delivered to a warehouse near the suppliers, consolidates them into full loads, and pays the lower costs of full-load transport to its operations.
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Types of Inventory Count Processes
While dealing with lots of inventory in a warehouse, lots of things can go wrong. Shipments may not have the right number of units in them, or they could get damaged somewhere along the supply chain. Discrepancies in the stock may arise as part of every inventory control, and need to be corrected immediately after the inventory control procedure has been finished.
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The Outbound process starts with routing the shipments. The Outbound execution process starts from the point when pick tasks are completed for an outbound shipment and ends at the point where the outbound packages are loaded into trailers. The Warehouse Outbound process includes managing and controlling outgoing materials starting from the download of orders through to the shipping of products from the warehouse.
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Business Case of Multiple Warehouses
Adding extra warehouses to business provides many benefits such as reducing shipping costs, increasing storage capacity, and having warehouses for specific purposes to simplify overall warehouse management. Multiple warehouses allow you to organize your inventory in a way that helps your business be more effective.
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When products arrive at a facility, there need to be a defined process to let them in. The process for accepting inventory when it arrives is called "Receiving". Any warehousing operation must be able to receive inventory or freight from trucks at loading docks and then stow them away in a storage location. Receiving often involves scheduling appointments for deliveries to occur, along with unloading the goods and performing a quality inspection.
