Warehouse Management A Complete Guide for Retailers

As a customer, would you not love to place the product order in a seamless manner, and receive it on the same or next day? On the other hand, how frustrating is it to find your selected product still out of stock or experiencing a delay in delivery? While retailers rehash their strategies in the wake of technological advancements and breakthrough innovations, warehouse management still remains an inevitable and crucial part of the holistic customer purchase and satisfaction arena.

Here we have touched upon the most basic yet significant details about warehouse management and warehouse management systems.

Warehouse Management System – An Overview

Warehouse management that essentially refers to the monitoring, control, and optimization of complex warehouse and distribution systems has witnessed a paradigm shift. This can be attributed to the latest technological trends, evolving customer expectations, and the need for retailers to go above and beyond in their service offerings. A warehouse management system plays a pivotal role here in assisting retailers to facilitate daily planning and management of warehouse resources

to transport and store every conceivable part of a business inventory process.

Why is a WMS needed?

Regardless of the size and scope of functionality of a warehouse, warehouse managers and operators must be proactive about their everyday operations. At such a juncture, warehouse management systems, be it on-premise or SaaS-based, are invaluable when it comes to processing and keeping a tab on inventory-related information.

Considering today’s scenario of integrated logistics, on-demand delivery and eCommerce fulfillment, even small and medium retail enterprises are leveraging robust and efficient WMSs to optimize their processes and scale up business ROI.

Warehouse management systems enable retailers to manage inventory in real-time, with data-driven insights into every aspect of the operations, to acquire a competitive edge over their industry counterparts. In addition, warehouse management systems are pivotal in minimizing labor expenses, enhancing customer service, improving inventory accuracy, enhancing flexibility, and

responsiveness.

A warehouse management system offers warehouse managers a 360-degree view of warehouse operations, eliminates error-prone human management with repetitive and dependable inventory information management, drilled down even to the SKU level. However, the benefits of WMSs do not stop at offering real-time and data-driven inventory information. Most of them are wired to track and deliver historical perspective into inventory operations that help the warehouse managers to predict future requirements and trends.

Advantages
Inventory Management Efficiency:

Inventory management efficiency is a crucial deciding factor for the success of any retailer, and here the role of a Warehouse Management System is unarguably crucial. From inventory management to improving order fulfillment, and controlling the warehouse’s activities in a holistic manner, WMSs also enable warehouse managers to keep a tab on each aspect of their warehouse functionality. Vin eRetail WMS solution offered by Vinculum ensures that inventory management is a much faster and easier endeavor for retailers. By providing quick and accurate results, it lets retailers respond better to growing and ever-evolving consumer demands. By enabling the exact mapping of inventory to provide solutions for on-time inventory replenishments, this has become a go-to solution for modern retailers.

Inventory Transparency:

Inventory visibility is highly essential and often the most crucial challenge encountered by most retailers. However, a robust WMS can help retailers overcome this challenge by offering real-time updates on warehouse operations, be it SKU-level information or order processing, shipment, and other key details. WMSs also come equipped with robust and seamless documentation capabilities that, in turn, help warehouse managers to estimate demand forecasts as well as inventory replenishment needs.

Improved Productivity & ROI:

Warehouse Management System is proven to optimize the efficiency, material workflow, consistency, and quality control of the warehouse in an easy, quick, error-free, and precise manner. It comes in handy in every stage of the fulfillment process, optimizes the time and resource management, reduces labor productivity with improved shipment accuracy.

Vinculum’s cloud WMS solution lets retailers promptly accelerate their ROI with improved sales and increased revenue streams by offering an automated and SaaS solution.

With robust Warehouse management systems, retailers won’t have to worry about incurring any upgrade, maintenance, or infrastructure costs. Besides, retailers don’t need to have an in-house experts’ team as the WMS is hosted on remote cloud servers, making inventory information accessible anytime, anywhere. Equipped with cross-platform compatibility and excellent integration capabilities, retailers can leverage this WMS to streamline a business’s entire supply chain and logistics processes from end-to-end.

Improved Customer and Supplier Relations:

Apart from retailers, customers also stand to benefit immensely from a WMS as they can enjoy several benefits such as improved order fulfillment, and order accuracy levels. This, in turn, helps retailers enhance their reputation, credibility, visibility, in building and nurturing greater customer and supplier relationships.

Paper-less Inventory Management:

Physical, and bulky documentation have become things of the past as WMSs pave the way for reshaping the paper-heavy transactions pertaining to inventory management. The real-time updates provided by SaaS WMSs help reduce paperwork to a great extent and make sure that inventory and information flow are in perfect alignment.

Key Aspects to Consider While Choosing A Warehouse Management System

If you are eyeing to take your retail business to the next step, leveraging a WMS is your best bet. If you are navigating through the options online/offline, you will come across a plethora of viable platforms. However, here are the things you must consider while selecting the right WMS for your retail business.

• Before choosing any WMS, make sure to identify, and set the short, and long-term objectives the WMS is going to cater to. Perform a cost-benefit analysis to maximize your ultimate business ROI.
• Ease of usage is the next essential feature that you should be looking at while choosing any WMS. It must be easy to navigate through and learn for your warehouse personnel.
• Do check out the automation, and integration capabilities of the WMS you are planning to opt for.
• Check out system capacity and the technical support offered by third-party service providers.

With Vin eRetail WMS, Vinculum’s cloud-based WMS solution, retailers can accelerate their growth. Interested to explore more? Connect with the experts at Vinculum today!