Handling your warehouse right is a crucial factor that affects directly on the success of your manufacturing business regardless of the industry you are in and the size of your business. Because it can be a breaking or making point for the whole business’s financials depending on the warehouse management costs. If not handled properly, warehouse management is a process that can cause you a significant financial loss. Mainly this happens as you find it difficult to keep track on all the moving pieces of your warehouse such as picking, receiving, order allocation, counting…etc which will cause wastes, inventory loss, increased labour and equipment costs and the list goes on and on.
Many suggest that implementing a good warehouse management system can help you save money in your warehouse.
In this post, we’ll explore the way a WMS will help you save money in the warehouse management process and how much it actually can save you.
Let’s start with how a warehouse management system can help you save money.
Labour efficiency
When you have to track and record picking, receiving, cycle counting, order allocation, serial number tracking manually there is no wonder that your employees won’t be able to keep up with the work which will cause wastes, item losses and many more issues that will end up costing you more money. But once you have a WMS implemented in your warehouse, everything will be automated so you can track and monitor everything on a screen. This will improve the efficiency of your labour force. Meaning more money will be saved.
Improved stock accuracy
Once you have a WMS, you’ll be able to identify stock levels of each item within minutes. Therefore, money wastes on overstocking will be reduced in a great deal as you’ll always know accurately what you are running out with a click of a button. Plus, modules like item self-life management comes in a WMS will help you plan your orders accordance to the requirement assuring you reduced product wastes.
Eliminating picking and shipping errors
A good WMS will help you eliminate a considerable amount of human errors usually occurred when performing tasks manually. Comprised of features such as real-time picking, duplicate record detectors, advancing picking paths, pricking priority management and order prioritization by date, customer status and fill rate and more, a warehouse management system will reduce errors in picking and shipping. So, you’ll be able to cut down costs of human errors.
Much better space utilization
The special modules of a WMS will help you optimize the space of your warehouse enabling you to store the same stocks in a lesser space with efficient space management. Thus, your money spent on renting out extra spaces to store items will be saved.
Speed up process
Once you have almost everything automated in your warehouse the time consumed to perform different tasks will be saved as your labours will be able to manage and monitor all the processes with few clicks. Therefore, the new gain speed will help you get more work done in lesser time reducing operational costs.
So, how much a WMS can save you exactly?
Basically, this is something solely depend on the sector you are in and how other factors of the warehouse management equation has already balanced out. However, usually, you can experience around a 20 % of cost saving in general trading by implementing a WMS and around a 25% increase in labour efficiency within the first twelve months. The number will increase further within the next few years with most of the businesses.
