Between surging labor costs, a shortage of workers, and facility rents climbing across North America, there’s not a warehousing operation today that isn’t operating with ever shrinking margins. Fortunately, a warehouse manager can harness the benefits of real-time visibility that can have a dramatic effect on the bottom line.
WHAT IS REAL-TIME VISIBILITY OF WAREHOUSE OPERATIONS?
Simply put, real-time visibility in warehousing is the ability to track inventory levels, the movement of goods, and order statuses as they happen.
Whether your facility is 10,000 square feet or 500,000 square feet, this up-to-date monitoring system shrinks your entire operation to the size of a tablet or computer monitor, every facet of the warehouse viewable at the click of a button.
Instead of manually entering inventory data on a pad of paper or a spreadsheet, then having to compile each employee’s inventory data into master reports that may then require being streamlined into a PowerPoint for analysis across the company, facilities that utilize real-time visibility use a simple yet game-changing barcode system and distribute mobile handheld devices to every employee on the warehouse floor.
A recent industry report by Orange Business Services found that only 45% of supply-chain operations were utilizing real-time visibility, however that number is expected to nearly double with 44% of those businesses who were using traditional tracking methods planning to make the switch in the next two years.
THE PITFALLS OF NOT IMPLEMENTING REAL-TIME VISIBILITY
When an organization relies on labor-intensive spreadsheet and/or paper methods to manage order fulfillment across tens to tens of thousands of SKUs, warehouse managers are left operating in the dark and reacting to information which is dated the moment it crosses their desk.
With competition upgrading to data-driven management systems at such an accelerated rate, the ability for a warehouse to stay competitive without leveraging modern tools such as barcode scanning is becoming next to impossible. Without real-time visibility across every aspect of a warehouse’s operations, a company’s fulfillment capacity, order completion speed, and traceability of goods is compromised, leading ultimately to a loss of profit realization.
But a company need not wait for their end of year balance sheet to see the tangible benefits of real-time visibility, the results apparently across a number of different areas of a warehouse.
THE BENEFITS OF REAL-TIME VISIBILITY
WAREHOUSE STORAGE OPTIMIZATION
Working off a static warehouse map is about as useful as an air traffic controller working off a hand-drawn diagram of the sky. Being at the mercy of pickers manually reporting updates from the warehouse floor leaves a warehouse manager always operating off outdated data, restricting the ability to strategically arrange stock in anticipation of heavy demand.
A facility that knows real-time metrics on the products being picked most frequently can rearrange layouts so that these in-demand items are closest to the packing area, reducing the time for pickers to fulfill orders, allowing them to pick more per shift which in turn reduces the number of staff a shift needs to meet order fulfillment targets. In the same vein, goods frequently picked and packaged together can be stored near each other. This not only increases the speed of getting orders out the door, it also reduces the physical strain on your team.
For more ways to see how to optimize warehousing storage, check out our previous post on the subject.
MEASURE LABOR PRODUCTIVITY
When pickers are equipped with handheld scanners, a warehouse manager is not only tracking the movement of goods but the movement of employees. Traditional methods of running a warehouse meant a manager could only ever truly gauge the performance of any member of the team on the warehouse floor by the moments they were there to see.
When you harness the benefits of real-time visibility, you can measure an employee’s number of picks and put-aways, as well as the level of accuracy and turnaround times. With this data, a warehouse manager can incentivize and award top performers while identifying those who may benefit from additional training. In turn, training can be tailored to the real-time visibility data as bad or inefficient habits across the warehouse floor come into focus.
With minute-by-minute tracking of the activities across a facility, a warehouse manager can also assign employees based on their strengths, like a sports manager drawing up a line-up, placing the right people on the right tasks to get them done both quickly and effectively.
TEAM-WIDE PROGRESS TRACKING
Real-time visibility data is not only being used by management to implement strategies and improve operations. On warehouse floors across North America, large monitors are being set-up with dashboards that display receiving progress bars and the number of picks remaining in a shift. In other warehouses, this information is right in every employees hand, available on their handheld units.
This data-set that every member of a warehouse staff has access to allows a team to see where they maybe be getting ahead or falling behind so they can reallocate resources as needs arise.
Through Impact’s unique gamification tools (click here to read a recent post about this), leader boards and awards can be incorporated, helping to incentivize employees in ways traditional management approaches cannot match.
BUILD CUSTOMER TRUST WITH INVENTORY VISIBILITY
When each SKU is barcoded and scanned before moving anywhere in a facility, inventory accuracy goes up to 99% versus labor-intensive cycle counts which are prone to human error. Being able to give your customers a detailed view of your inventory not only aids your company’s sales team but also builds trust and loyalty in your brand.
For warehouses that facilitate online shopping portals, handheld devices can be setup to update website inventory information each time a picker pulls an item from the shelf, freeing warehouse staff from having to update the digital shop on the backend or handing off -delayed reports to sales staff.
REAL-TIME VISIBILITY INCREASES THE ACCURACY OF DEMAND FORECASTING
You would never rely on a weather report based solely on historical data, so why would you entrust your business plans to traditional demand forecasting methods based on historic and static models?
With real-time data streams, AI algorithms can be leveraged to get an up-to-the-minute sense of changing customer preferences and rising trends. Having this information empowers to build fact-based inventory plans, place pinpoint accurate orders with suppliers that eliminate the dreaded issues of both overstocking and understocking, and give a company’s sales and marketing teams invaluable data to build campaigns around.
IMPROVE VENDOR RELATIONS
Harnessing real-time visibility in warehouse operations is not all about picking orders to get out the door, the data is also a boon to a facilities receiving department.
A warehouse manager can quickly track what inventory is low and needs to be ordered and the status of order fulfillments. This data stream is also vital for quality control, flagging any issues with a vendor’s products as soon as they hit the warehouse floor, empowering the company to hold vendors accountable for quality commitments as they become an issue.
These tools also help manage vendor relationships, tracking not only the quality of goods received metrics like order accuracy and on-time deliveries, capturing a picture of which suppliers are most reliable and allowing companies to shift their reliance to those they know can maintain their link in the supply chain.
From every facet of a warehouse operation and through to departments from sales to marketing, the benefits of real-time visibility to warehouse operations are immeasurable. As customers expectations on delivery times and inventory availability rise at the same time that costs and labor availability put new strains on warehouse operations, companies of all sizes can no longer afford not to prioritize the real-time data tools of a Warehouse Management System.
With Impact WMS, a warehouse manager can streamline each aspect of the operation they oversee and have an eye on every single operation going on on their warehouse floor, no matter how busy the facility is. In today’s business environment, it is becoming not just a competitive advantage but a necessary tool in any warehouses arsenal.