A truck has just pulled up to your receiving dock to deliver some needed product for your inventory. The load is pulled off the truck and is now sitting on your dock area floor. How well your operation handles the next step is crucial to everything else that will happen in the warehouse. Receiving is the single most important operation in the warehouse. Without a doubt almost all the problems that can occur in the warehouse can be traced back to improperly received inventory.
In many cases if your warehouse is paper driven a receiver finds or prints out one or more PO’s and begins to manually check in the order(s). This person will manually count, mark up the PO’s with numbers or letters, cross out lines, and make notes on the PO’(s) All hand written of course in order to somehow identify what and how much has arrived. This can be an excruciatingly slow process and fraught with mistakes. Once this is done the paperwork gets sent to the office so that a data entry person can attempt to read and decipher what is on the PO'(s) and update the inventory and set up the PO’(s) to get paid. This process is equally slow and many errors can and do occur. The result is inaccurate inventory quantities and or locations. This in turn will cause lost sales and unhappy customers. It also causes the purchasing department to buy more than is needed which increase costs. or purchasing buys less and causes inadequate inventory amounts which also creates lost orders and unhappy customers.
An electronic warehouse management system can end these problems, reduce the costs associated with the receiving process and eliminate the errors. This results are better fill rates, happy customers and higher revenue. The secret is the use of barcode technology, a solid warehouse management system, seamless integration to your business software system and a well defined easy to follow process. Products that are received into the inventory accurately and efficiently will make the put-away and picking processes more efficient as well. Efficiency equals lower costs and lower costs will drive increased revenue and improved customer satisfaction
No matter if you operation is small or large a properly installed WMS will benefit your company. For more information check out www.icepts.com or click here to download an informative white paper on how goods move through a warehouse managed by a WMS solution.
