In many of my blog posts I talk about “Return on Investment” and how much money a distributor can save by implementing a warehouse management system. Today I want to shift the message to customer satisfaction. I thought to consider with supply chain management technology is that you can both increase customer service and reduce inventory errors with warehouse management systems (WMS).
What does your customer want? The product(s) they ordered, on time, in the quantity they needed, delivered as quickly and inexpensively as possible.
Mistakes are extremely expensive. Mistakes cost your customer’s productivity, time, money lost sales and customer dissatisfaction. It costs you lost productivity, lost sales, lost freight and shipping costs, inventory problems and the distinct possibility of lost customers. New customers are hard to come by so taking care of the ones you have is imperative. Mistakes are a very big problem for distributors whose net profits are already razor thin.
In manually, “paper-driven” run warehouses it is very possible to reduce mistakes by creating rigid processes that while they may work at reducing mistakes greatly increases your overhead and reduces productivity. Many of the manual processes I see distributors using look good on paper but when the orders begin to pile up shortcuts are taken and many of the steps that are in place get overlooked in order to ship the orders.
A well implemented warehouse management system will help you create highly efficient processes for handling inventory and picking orders that will eliminate the inefficiencies and mistake riddled processes that plague most distributors. This will enhance your customer satisfaction numbers and most likely help you attract new customers without adding to your workforce.
Happy customers and lower costs equal higher profits. Inventory is probably one of your biggest assets as a distributor; what not optimize the entire shipping, receiving, picking, and packing process to streamline the flow of inventory in and out of your warehouse.
Learn more here about Warehouse Management Systems Features:
