5 Ways to Optimize Your Warehouse

As manufacturing and distribution organizations strive to seize the value of Industry 4.0, many warehouse operations remain constrained by legacy software and manual processes.

Here are five ways your organization can capitalize on technology and optimize warehouse operations.

Master Inventory Management

Effectively managing your inventory is necessary for efficient operations, overall profitability, and meeting customer and vendor expectations. Awareness of your current inventory, dead stock, high-demand SKUs, and seasonally driven products is made easy with Inventory Management Systems (IMS).

As part of your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, an IMS provides better inventory visibility and accuracy for your warehouse management team.

Business management solutions like Microsoft Dynamics and NetSuite integrate all functional areas of your business, from inventory to purchasing. These systems enable streamlined workflows and automation of manual processes, such as inventory replenishment and real-time item count tracking.

Increase Pick and Pack Efficiency

To achieve a faster, less error-prone order-picking process, consider leveraging RF barcode technology tailored to your warehouse environment. These tools seamlessly integrate with your warehouse management system, assigning products to the correct locations as soon as they arrive on-site. Order fulfillment will know exactly where the product is every time.

This level of precision gives you greater visibility into inventory levels and the locations of products. Technology like this can also optimize picker routes, improving their movements through the warehouse and saving you time. Real-time cloud updates ensure accurate inventory levels, reduced errors, and happier customers.

Eliminate Redundant Warehousing Workflows

Redundant workflows lead to wasteful double handling in your warehouse. Manual processes are usually the culprit, resulting in staff frustration and reduced production efficiency. These inefficiencies decrease your agility, slowing your response time to changing market conditions and customer demands.

Cloud-based modern business solutions, from automated inventory management to streamlined pick and pack, provide a transparent, real-time view into process improvements. These innovations help lower labor costs and increase production.

Reduce Reliance on Spreadsheets

An astonishing 67.4% of warehouse management teams say Excel (or Google Sheets) is their go-to inventory management tool.

However, Excel was never designed to fit the increasingly complicated warehouse management sector. Most organizations cannot rely on it to effectively manage modern warehousing and distribution nuances. As you grow and scale, the risk and error brought on by spreadsheets only increases.

Modern technology offers a solution by capturing real-time data and organizing it into meaningful, actionable insights. Such platforms can handle the nuance of warehouse management and work across departments to streamline processes and improve access to key data, making a clear business case to invest.

Automation can be an important driver of how this modern technology helps streamline your business. If your team performs a lot of repetitive, manual data entry and you enable automation in your back-office software, you can streamline redundant processes in the same way you would on your production line.

Invest in Technical Training

Most warehouse managers know they need new technology. The concern is the initial drop in productivity and the need for training teams in these new tools.

Today, technology has evolved to be more user-friendly, accessible, and intuitive. Onboarding your teams is more seamless than ever before, especially if you’re mindful about change management. When you involve your team in key decisions, integrate the new technology into their workflows, and train them according to their roles and concerns, you’ll find the timeline to adoption is shorter and more efficient. You’ll be more productive from day one, reducing business disruption and ensuring full adoption from your team.

Now is the Time to Optimize Your Warehouse

Industry 4.0 is no longer on the horizon; it is upon us. If your warehouse operations are stuck in the past, it affects your entire business. The setbacks related to manual processes, outdated technologies and platforms, reliance on Excel, and poor visibility over inventory are damaging to profitability, customer satisfaction, and sustainable operations overall.

However, it’s important to consider each technology investment carefully:

• How does the technology fit into the bigger picture?
• Does it help you work toward defined goals for your business?
• Does it help your people work more efficiently?

If you're not sure how to answer these questions, consider a business strategy and technology assessment with a partner you can trust.