Warehouse Management Systems – A Comprehensive Guide


September 13, 2021
7 MIN READ
Vinculum
Written by:
Vinculum
warehouse-management-systems-a-comprehensive-guide

Overview

Customer satisfaction has always been the holy grail for businesses irrespective of their size, scale, complexity, and industrial expertise. Today, meeting customer expectations and satisfaction is no longer cutting to the chase. Today’s Gen-Z customers are looking forward to being delighted with hyper-personalized, hassle-free, and seamless experiences. And, when it comes to order fulfillment, brands, and businesses in the retail space must ensure customer engagement in a multifaceted manner.

What is Warehouse Management?

Warehouse management is unarguably at the core of these business operations. Without a robust warehouse management mechanism, robust order fulfillment, customer service, etc. won’t be attained. While most businesses have leveraged a manual process of tracking their stocks, moving and putting them away by leveraging an in-house warehouse team, the task gets challenging when brands have to manage inventory across multiple sales and distribution channels. A warehouse management system emerges here to save the day. Considering the growth perspective and global scalability, more and more businesses are realizing the importance of warehouse management systems and eyeing to unleash their ultimate potential.

Why Do Businesses Need a Warehouse Management System?

Regardless of warehouse size and scope, warehouse management has been one of the core pillars for businesses. It’s necessary for warehouse managers and operators to be on top of their game not only to survive in the ever-competitive market but to strive. Warehouse management systems available in two variants such as on-premise and SaaS-based are invaluable when it comes to processing inventory-related information at a central place. Given today’s scenario of integrated logistics, on-demand delivery, and eCommerce fulfillment, even small and medium business enterprises are embracing robust and efficient WMSs wholeheartedly to optimize their processes and scale up business ROI.

Warehouse management systems play a pivotal role in enabling businesses to manage inventory in real-time, with data-driven, deep, actionable insights into every aspect of the operations, to acquire a competitive edge over their industry counterparts. Besides, WMSs are deemed beneficial when it comes to minimizing labor expenses, enhancing customer service, improving inventory accuracy, enhancing flexibility, and responsiveness.

A warehouse management system assists the warehouse managers with a 360-degree view of warehouse operations and eliminates error-prone human management. However, the benefits of WMSs go much more beyond just offering real-time and data-driven inventory information. Most of the WMSs are geared towards efficiently tracking and delivering historical perspective into inventory operations that can help warehouse managers to predict future requirements and trends.

Succinct Functions and Advantages of a Warehouse Management System

Inventory Management Efficiency:

Thinking of robust, resilient, and real-time inventory management? Think warehouse management systems. These solutions are crafted to improve order fulfillment and manage warehouse activities in a multi-pronged manner. In the meantime, these solutions assist warehouse managers to keep a tab on each detail for improved order fulfillment and accuracy. Vinculum’s Vin eRetail WMS solution is crafted to ensure that inventory management is a much faster, easier, and hassle-free task for businesses. By providing quick and accurate results, Vin eRetail lets you respond better to growing and ever-evolving consumer expectations. It enables the exact mapping of inventory to provide solutions for on-time inventory replenishment, avoid inventory under and overstocking.

Inventory Transparency:

Having holistic inventory visibility is often the most crucial challenge most businesses contend with. And, when it’s about managing inventories across multiple sales, and distribution channels, the management even gets more daunting. Well, no more. With a robust WMS, this challenge can be overcome efficiently. A WMS provides real-time updates on warehouse operations, which might be pertaining to the SKU-level information or order processing, shipment, and other warehouse-related relevant details. The robust and seamless documentation capabilities are some of the strong fortes of most WMSs that ensure complete transparency. Accurate inventory visibility offered by WMSs helps warehouse managers to estimate demand forecasts of the best-selling products during specific times of the year so that the inventory replenishment needs are taken care of on time.

Improved Productivity & ROI:

Warehouse Management Systems are crafted to optimize the efficiency, material workflow, consistency, and quality control of the warehouses at an unbeatable speed accompanied with accuracy and precision. Vin eRetail, the cloud-based warehouse management solution by Vinculum has been phenomenal in improving every stage of the fulfillment process, optimizing the time and resource management, reducing manual labor with improved shipment accuracy.

Vinculum’s cloud WMS solution, Vin eRetail, lets businesses promptly accelerate their ROI with improved sales and increased revenue streams. Further, the automated SaaS solution is less prone to errors. Businesses are all set to delight their customers with easy, quick, and hassle-free order fulfillment in more than one way.

Compared to conventional manual warehouse management operations, leveraging a Warehouse management system is much more cost-efficient. There are no extra charges associated with any upgrade, maintenance, or infrastructure costs. The affordable system enables businesses to preserve and in fact, accelerate their profit margins as everything else is installed, managed, and maintained by the third-party WMS vendor or service provider. Businesses don’t need to keep an in-house experts’ team on the payroll as the entire system is hosted on remote cloud servers. With inventory information accessible at all times, from anywhere, from any device, businesses stand to gain considerably. In addition, WMSs come with cross-platform compatibility and easy integration capabilities with multiple systems to streamline a business’s entire supply chain and logistics processes from end to end.

Improved Customer and Supplier Relations:

WMSs offer quite a great deal of benefits to businesses from enhancing their reputation, credibility to visibility. Vin eRetail WMS enables businesses with better order fulfillment and decreased inaccuracies. This helps businesses in building and nurturing greater customer and supplier relationships. And, customers also stand to gain a lot from them. With WMSs in place, customers enjoy a plethora of benefits such as improved order fulfillment, decreased inventory levels, and enhanced order accuracy levels.

Paper-less Inventory Management:

Gone were the days when physical filing and documentation of inventory details and operations were used predominantly. WMSs enabled by automation play a crucial role in reshaping the warehouse management paradigm by replacing paper-heavy transactions with real-time updates provided by warehouse management systems. It helps reduce the paperwork considerably and ensures that inventory and information flow are in perfect synchrony.

Warehouse management systems play a pivotal role in enabling businesses to manage inventory in real-time, with data-driven, deep, actionable insights into every aspect of the operations, to acquire a competitive edge over their industry counterparts. Besides, WMSs are deemed beneficial when it comes to minimizing labor expenses, enhancing customer service, improving inventory accuracy, enhancing flexibility, and responsiveness.

A warehouse management system assists the warehouse managers with a 360-degree view of warehouse operations, eliminates error-prone human management with repetitive and dependable inventory information management, drilled down even to the SKU level. However, the benefits of WMSs don’t stop at only offering real-time and data-driven inventory information. Most of the WMSs are geared towards efficiently tracking and delivering historical perspective into inventory operations that can help warehouse managers to predict future requirements and trends.

How Vinculum Can Help?

Vinculum’s Vin eRetail WMS with a place in the Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Warehouse Management Systems has been phenomenal when it comes to B2B warehousing or B2C fulfillment needs of high-growth brands, From inventory serialization to batch management of inventory, virtual bundling to efficient logistics management backed by shipping rules and guidelines, it aims at ensuring the accuracy, speed, and profitability of warehouse operations. Its seamless compatibility with ZPL/EPL-supported printers eliminates the need for third-party or paid printing platforms. Besides, it employs batch and wave picking methodology for inventory to enhance the accuracy of inventory management, productivity, streamlines processes, and aids in space optimization.

For further details, do connect with the experts at Vinculum today!

 

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