The manufacturing industry faces unrelenting pressure from increasing product range, shorter lead times, and inflation. In this environment, efficient warehouse management has become essential for any business to thrive. Gone are the days of manual inventory taking, inefficient item tracking, and late deliveries. In today's fast-paced business world, best practices can revolutionize warehouse management and drive business success.
Warehouse Management Best Practice Ideas
Goods receipt, putaway, picking, goods issue, loading, inventory counting, and internal movements are essential warehouse processes that need improvement to enhance efficiency, improve safety and increase productivity. Warehouse best practices can lead to improvements in each of these processes. Some effective best practices in warehouse management include:
- Ensure all goods are inspected and are of the correct quantity and quality. After receiving goods, take factors like picking frequency, product size, and weight into account when storing them.
- Optimizing layout and storage space: Optimizing warehouse layout space helps streamline goods movement and optimize storage space usage.
- Cross-docking: Cross-docking allows receipt of products directly from suppliers and immediate shipping to customers. The process brings downtime for which a product is kept in the warehouse leading to increased efficiency.
- Automation: Automation using robots reduced the cost of warehouse management while enhancing its efficiency. Automating repetitive tasks like picking, sortation, storage, and retrieval helps in reducing the chances of human error and freeing up workers’ time for more productive tasks.
- High-bay narrow aisle racks: High-bay narrow aisle racks are used to maximize warehouse storage capacity. The racking system is particularly useful in high-volume warehouses to optimize the usage of limited space.
Following these best practices helps organizations improve their warehouse efficiency, which translates into reduced costs and a competitive edge in the market.
Innovapptive offers an SAP-certified mobile solution for Inventory and Warehouse Management (mInventory). mInventory enables your warehouse users to perform common inventory transactions through handheld devices, smartphones, and RF scanners. They quickly perform transactions from the devices in their hands, which results in real-time transaction processing, improved data accuracy, and increased convenience.
mInventory helps your employees make more informed decisions and improve your business operations while reducing expenses. It also allows you to mobilize and optimize your supply chain while ensuring error-free transactions on the fly. Moreover, your warehouse employee can avoid duplicate scans/entries of barcodes, thereby eliminating downstream problems.
The Benefits of Improved Warehouse Management
Improving warehouse management by adopting the best practices above offers numerous benefits, including:
- Increased productivity and resource efficiency
- Improved customer satisfaction
- Reduced errors
- Fewer missed deliveries
- Increased accuracy and accountability
It also brings greater visibility of inventory levels, enabling more informed business decisions and improving staff morale and job satisfaction along the way. Best practices such as those described here help businesses save time and money.
Improved warehouse management also enables businesses to meet demand right when needed. It helps optimize inventory levels and storage space to avoid stockout situations. Besides, it also allows organizations to improve regulatory compliance.
Ready to Digitally Transform Your Inventory and Warehouse Operations?
Eliminate the inherent complexities and dependencies of offline processing and redefine your user experience with a simple and cost-effective mobile solution that can run on any smartphone or tablet. Innovapptive’s mInventory lets warehouse directors, managers, and supervisors view, update and make better decisions on stock levels, maintain accurate stock reports, and improve demand forecasting.
To learn more about Innovapptive’s mInventory, check out the demo video or watch the product description video here. To talk to an Innovapptive solution expert, call 1-844-464-6668.
