Increasing revenue for your company can occur with increase sales, however, some companies struggle with effectively managing their warehouse labor cost; which can also have a direct effect on profitability.
Effectively managing labor costs in most businesses is difficult. Labor costs account for a huge portion of your cost of doing business. Arguably your staff in the warehouse can/will make or break your business.
Reducing or reallocating labor is the primary driver for finding the money to pay for a warehouse management solution. A properly implemented WMS like Accellos One Warehouse can reduce your labor needs, help you reallocate staff and or keep you from needing to bring on more staff to meet growing sales or seasonal fluctuations. More people mean more problems most of the time. There is a long list of labor areas that are strongly impacted by the implementation and use of best practices while deploying a WMS.
From the moment product hits your receiving dock until the invoice is sent for the shipped out items people are involved. By using a WMS you increase the efficiency and accuracy of the work they do while eliminating the mistakes they will make. A best of breed WMS should provide useful labor reports that can help you determine who your best people are and who needs help. When the WMS is integrated tightly to your ERP/accounting/business management software you can eliminate the costly clerical work. This allows the people doing this manual data entry to be re-positioned into areas that will help the company make money not just spend it. Another plus here is the accuracy factor a WMS provides. You can also speed up the invoices process which gets you paid in a more timely manner.
Here is an overview of areas of improvement;
- Lines picked per shift are improved
- Fill rates increase
- Inventory accuracy is dramatically improved
- Reduced staff and increased work volume
- Higher pick/pack rates
- Reduced shipping department needs
- Shift elimination and or hour reductions
- Transportation cost are optimized
It is not unusual for a WMS to reduce labor costs by 20 to 30 percent. Lets look at a simple example. If your annual labor cost for a staff of 15 warehouse employees including clerical support is $561,000.00 (18.00 per hour loaded, X 2080 per year, X 15 employees) and you save 20% with the implementation of a WMS you would save $112,000.00. That is huge! Of course every business is different but I have seen this kind of savings by many of our customers. Maybe its time you took a good look at what you could save.
Learn more about WMS by clicking here: Warehouse Management Systems Functionality
