The evolution of warehouse management system (WMS) is very similar to many other software solutions. Initial system to control the movement and storage of materials inside the warehouse, the warehouse's role is expanded to include light manufacturing, transportation management, order management, and complete accounting system. The use of his grandfather's business-related software, manufacturing resource planning, as a comparison, material requirements planning (MRP) started as a system of planning requirements, raw material production environment. MRP soon evolved into manufacturing resource planning (MRPII system), in which the basic MRP system and added scheduling and capacity planning logic. MRPII system eventually evolved into enterprise resource planning (ERP), put all the MRPII system, adequate financial and customer and supplier management functions. Now, both the warehouse management system into a storage-centric ERP system is a good thing or not up to debate. Clear that the expansion of overlapping functional warehouse management system, enterprise resource planning, layout planning requirements, traffic and transportation management systems, supply chain planning, advanced planning and scheduling, and manufacturing execution system will only increase the chaos level of companies looking for software solutions business.
Although the warehouses continue to receive additional functionality, the core function of the first warehouse management system has not really changed. The main purpose is to control the flow management system and storage of materials and processes operations related party transactions. For picking, in view of the supplementary and instructed key putaway warehouse. Detailed installation and management system can handle a big difference from a software vendor to another, but the basic logic will use a combination of project, location, quantity, unit of measure, and to information, to determine the shares, in where the selection, and in what order to perform these operations.
Do you really need the WMS?
Not every warehouse needs a warehouse. Of course, any warehouse could benefit from some of the features, but a great benefit as evidenced by the initial and ongoing costs associated with management systems? Warehouse Management System is a large, complex, data-intensive applications. They often require a large amount of the initial installation, many system resources to run, many of the ongoing data management, continue to run. Yes, you need to "manage" your warehouse "management" system. Under normal circumstances, large-scale operations will eventually create a new IS departments the only responsible for the management of the warehouse management system.
Claims:
Warehouse management system will reduce the inventory!
Warehouse management system will reduce labor costs!
Warehouse management system will increase the storage capacity!
Warehouse management system will enhance customer service!
Warehouse management system will increase the accuracy of inventory!
Reality:
Implementation of a warehouse management system and automatic data collection will likely give you increased accuracy, reduced labor costs (provided the labor necessary to maintain the system is less than the labor saved on the warehouse floor), and a greater ability to serve our customers by reducing cycle. Expected to reduce inventory and increase the possibility of a smaller storage capacity. Although the increased accuracy and efficiency in the receiving process may reduce the level of safety stock needs, the impact may be reduced is negligible compared to the overall inventory levels. The most important factor, controlling inventory levels, quantities, delivery time and demand changes. It is impossible to have a major impact on the storage of any factors. And at the same time to provide a warehouse management tools, more organized storage may lead to more storage capacity, which has improved relative rash How do you pre-memory processes.
In addition to labor efficiency in the decisive factors in determining the implementation of a Reye's often more frequently with the need for something to serve your customers, your current system does not support (or do not support, as well as) in the case of FIFO, cross-docking, automatic selection of supplementary , wave picking, and many track and car park management, automatic data acquisition, automatic material handling equipment, etc.