By Ian Hobkirk
Managing Director of Commonwealth Supply Chain Advisors
Under increasing pressure to work faster, better, and smarter in today’s omni-channel and e-commerce business environment, companies need help getting their distribution operations up to speed with customer demands and expectations. To help, I’ve identified 10 key tactics that successful companies are employing in order to make a graceful transition to higher levels of e-commerce in the distribution center.
In Parts 1 through 4 of this ten-part blog series, I detailed four basic tactics: Create a Forward Pick Area, Setup Effective Replenishment, Determine Overall Pick Strategy and Determine the Optimal Pick Methodology. This blog, Part 5, will focus on the first Intermediate Tactic: Practice Real-Time Warehousing.
Tactic #5: Practice Real-Time Warehousing
As the complexity of a company’s pick methodology increases, the need for a real-time warehousing system to direct and confirm the execution of these picks becomes more and more important. While discrete order picking and very basic cluster picking can be managed with paper-based pick tickets, high-volume cluster picking, zone picking, and batch picking almost always require the use of a WMS to administer.
Wireless, mobile devices are WMS’ backbone. These devices generally feature a small computer screen where workers receive instructions, a bar-code scanner where workers can confirm that they have properly executed those instructions, and an alphanumeric keypad to enter additional pieces of information.
WMS serves several critical functions in the distribution center:
- Organization of work
- Task direction
- Transaction confirmation
- Real-time location tracking
- Elimination of redundant data entry
WMS systems are usually cost justified by the labor savings they enable. For instance, labor requirements can be drastically reduced when companies transition from discrete order picking to cluster picking. This labor can be redeployed to other areas of the operation where it can be better utilized.
As with most forms of technology, one size does not fit all. There are over 100 different providers of Warehouse Management Software in the marketplace today, each with their own set of strengths and weaknesses. Careful attention should be given to the selection of a WMS provider. Decisions made here will have implications for years to come in terms of functionality which can be enabled in the distribution center, and the level of technical resources required to support and maintain the system. Related content, Whitepaper: “Selecting the Right WMS.”
Six categories of WMS vendors
I divide the WMS provider community into six categories:
- Category #1: Full Features & Functionality
- Category #2: Flexibility and Adaptability
- Category #3: Short Time-to-Value
- Category #4: Ease of Enterprise Integration
- Category #5: Ease of MHE Integration
- Category #6: Industry Focus
Properly implementing a WMS system can take a year or more. Generally, companies should allow the following amounts of time for this initiative:
- Distribution Optimization: 3 – 6 months
- WMS Vendor Selection: 2 – 4 months
- WMS Implementation: 6 – 12 months
It is worth noting that for very simple operations without a lot of process complexity, WMS implementation time can be drastically shortened, to as little as two months. More companies are offering WMS in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model which can facilitate shorter implementation times as well. To learn more about planning for WMS implementation, read, “The Ultimate WMS Preparation Guidebook.”
In the next installment of this ten-part blog series we’ll move on to cover the second Intermediate Tactic, Optimize Packing.