Warehouse management

What are the challenges of warehouse management?

Choosing an inventory-based strategy means implementing an effective management strategy for a warehouse, an essential goods storage area. Warehouse management is at the heart of the company's supply chain. This is a real factor of performance and success, particularly for companies operating in the e-commerce sector.

The keys to successful warehouse management :

Good organization is essential: today's computerized warehouses provide greater control over management in real time. In fact, a global vision of warehouse operations enables us to respond to customer orders under ideal conditions, while optimizing volumes and costs. Supply chain managers are able to know at any given moment what stocks of different products are available, as all items are perfectly identified. In this context, it is important for the company to define a clear organization, from the moment a product enters the unloading area to the moment it leaves the warehouse. Because the warehouse is not only a place of storage, but also a place where goods pass through, it must be able to handle a large number of physical and administrative operations at the same time. This implies that the various warehouse sites must be conceived and designed as a genuine logistics platform. Its main functions: storage, verification and supply of goods in the logistics chain.

Today, these developments considerably improve the profitability of operators, and are now part of good logistics practice.
But for this to happen, you need the right IT tools! Computerized warehouse management (better known as Warehouse Management System, or WMS) provides better knowledge of the quantity and quality of warehouse activity and stocks, helps avoid picking errors, improves the use of resources and surface areas, improves traceability, and thus adapts resources to the work to be carried out, optimizes transport costs, and more generally controls operations. The software package handles information on incoming and outgoing goods, and analyzes all the internal operations required for flow management. Depending on the size of the warehouse, its complexity, the number of operators and the company's logistics requirements, the most appropriate system will be installed. For example, the program organizes locations on the basis of strategies and rules, identifies containers and products from receipt, and is capable of issuing instructions to operators indicating where to deposit or retrieve goods. The use of a WMS is recommended for stock control, even when few products are stored. It becomes indispensable when the number of references is significant.

The benefits of optimal warehouse management

Warehouse management is a key factor in end-customer satisfaction. It guarantees on-time delivery without errors (out-of-stock, wrong product, etc.) The main purpose of warehouses is to regulate the differences between incoming stock flows, i.e. what is received from suppliers or production plants, and outgoing stock flows, i.e. products sent to manufacturing centers, points of sale, etc.
The warehouse is a strategic location for a company, whatever its sector of activity. That's why warehouse management software improves performance, offers more efficient work processes, and minimizes errors. From the company's point of view, all these functions need to be performed optimally and at the lowest possible cost in order to improve competitiveness.