what to expect from your wms?

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- speed, control & flexibility in warehouse operations

WHITEPAPER

WHAT TO EXPECT FROM YOUR WMS?

WHITEPAPER WHAT TO EXPECT FROM YOUR WMS? 2

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On most markets companies are facing tougher competition and

increasing requirements on service levels and cost control, but at the

same time balance growth or right-sizing with shorter cycles of phase-in

/ phase-out of product assortments. This means you need to take

advantage of information technology to support change, secure data

and process quality and improve productivity and performance.

This whitepaper explores how a Warehouse Management System (WMS)

can provide different roles in your organization with a set of tools to

support their role, and to build speed, control and flexibility into your

warehouse operation. It also outlines what you should look for in a WMS

to help you create competitive advantages and increased profitability.

Warehouse management is often the core of Supply Chain Execution

(SCE) solutions, aiming at helping companies to implement supply

chain best practices for physical handling of goods in finished goods

warehouses, central warehouses, distribution centers, cross-dock centers,

return centers, and local outlets.

A good Warehouse Management System (WMS) supports different

roles in performing their tasks better. It enables companies to optimize

warehouse operations and increase utilization of warehouse space,

reduce obsolete products, improve delivery reliability and increases

warehouse turnover. It is also instrumental that the warehouse operation

integrates with the surrounding planning, ordering and transportation

processes to support full control of the logistics operation, whether in

manufacturing, transportation, warehousing, wholesale or retail. When

the node becomes a bridge in the supply chain, the WMS can truly help

boost individual and overall performance.

INTRODUCTION


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KEY USER BENEFITS Regardless of whether you are a warehouse manager or

worker, a WMS has a lot to offer in helping you fulfill your daily

responsibilities and tasks. Let’s look at what a WMS solution can

do for you in any of these roles:

• C-level supply chain executive

• Warehouse/Site manager

• Area/Shift manager

• Warehouse worker

• Warehouse analyst

• IT manager

• Client account manager

C-LEVEL SUPPLY CHAIN EXECUTIVE If you are a C-level executive or VP of operations or supply

chain, the WMS is a solution that helps you not only to meet

aggressive benchmarks for your organization’s productivity and

quality, but also to support initiatives and supply chain models

for fast inventory rotation, trusted and safe process control and

customer satisfaction.

You also need to secure that all aspects of the operation can be

monitored and measured across sites, relationships (vendors,

customers) and products.

Growing or restructuring your business

Are you expanding or acquiring new businesses to gain market

share? Do you plan to move into new markets or regions? To

support growth, you need your facilities to cope with increased

volumes and flexible sales and distribution channels. Preferably

without building new sites. You need a WMS that can scale to

support your strategies, and to seamlessly fit into your logistics

network design and distribution models.

Increasing customer service

Shipping the right products, services and quality at the right

time and cost is a simple recipe. But delivering the perfect order

calls for process control, efficient deployment of resources and

responsiveness in the warehouse operation. With the proper

WMS solution, objectives for customer satisfaction along with

inventory, picking and shipping accuracy can, and should, be set

high. As for transaction control and traceability, it needs to be

built-in.

Creating a lean supply chain

Increasing inventory turnover to drive out cost and increase

customer responsiveness is your daily challenge. Do you need

to align supply chain processes with your manufacturing

operation? Or tie in external suppliers more effectively and turn

your warehouse operations into high-performing flow-through

centers? Implemented correctly, the right WMS can certainly

help you here with ability to integrate information flows and

leverage automated data collection standards and technologies.

Protecting your investment Adding facilities? Introducing transit shipments and cross-

docking? Planning for automation or other new technologies?

You want a solution that is flexible to adapt to your priorities and

business needs and still be 100 % reliable. Business processes

need to be supported with a minimum of code changes using

configurable workflows, business rules and integration models.


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Control Integrated with the WMS you should look for integrated

performance management components that provides

dashboards and reports that help you identify trends and

warehouse performance across sites and over time, with well

defined KPIs and (if you want to) drill-down into granular data

to analyze reasons for good or bad performance.

Pick up the challenge and start thinking of how you can use

WMS functionality and configurability to support your best

practices and exceed your competitors in flawless supply chain

execution!

WAREHOUSE/SITE MANAGER As the site or warehouse manager, you want to control all

aspects of your operation to make sure you are tuning the

processes correctly to meet cost and service objectives.

You want to align your resources to make your warehouse

operation both a reliable and high-performing production

engine, as well as a responsive vehicle for executing changes

in service requirements. Also, you need to rest assured that

the WMS solution will allow you to adopt new technology

for material handling and automatic identification where

appropriate. You are constantly challenged to reduced cost and

increase service levels.

High throughput in a dynamic environment

It is easy to push big volumes in a batch environment where

you know what orders you need to receive, pick and ship. But

reality is different. You might need to work with late order stop

times and same day shipping. You might have a production line

that pushes products into the warehouse and for immediate

allocation to customer orders. The right WMS can deal with

less than 24 hour cycle times from order through to delivery at

customers’ site, and help you manage this planning nightmare

Process quality

A true real-time WMS solution imposes the level of transaction

control and quality checks that you want, helping your

staff avoid mistakes. It needs to be designed for a paperless

environment and system-directed task management.

Warehouse efficiency and utilization

For optimal performance, you need to look at doing things

right by setting up correct workflows and routines. But no less

important is doing the right things and look dynamically at

order priorities, departure dead-lines, outstanding tasks, and

inventory status to support and automate this decision making.

This can be enabled by configuring warehouse workflows that

directs process execution based on product, customer and

resource constraints.

Labor efficiency Resource optimization must be built-in as the core philosophy

in the solution, always looking at the best way to execute across

all existing tasks, given the available locations, equipment and

staff. But you also want answers on questions like: Do I have

the right staffing? Is the workforce performing below or above

target? Why is one team performing better than another? The

WMS can provide you with the right data to support you here.

Inventory productivity

Are the products in the right location? How quickly are we

turning inventory for different products? Do we spend much

time driving with empty forks? Inventory management might

not be your responsibility, but you surely want to be able to

see how to organize the operation to minimize travel time and

increase space utilization.


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Warehouse technology

Thinking of voice-directed picking? Investing in a new conveyer

system? Are customers requiring RFID-tagging? The solution

needs to support integration to most kinds of material handling

equipment and RF devices, including voice recognition.

Stability

If you are into high transaction volume processing for

extremely demanding customers, the WMS solution must not

let you down. It needs to be designed for 24 by 7 operations to

just run, run, run.

Warehouse monitoring and control As warehouse manager you should be working with preventive

exception management and not fire-fighting. The WMS should

provide you with monitoring dashboards for the real-time

view on workload, queues and exceptions. And with reports

and analysis tools for seeking root causes and benchmarking

against other sites.

As a Warehouse Manager, can you say that it is good enough

with only a few of these properties covered? No, guess not. So

you should look for a solution that gives you all of the above.

SHIFT/AREA MANAGER Being responsible for a staff of warehouse workers – perhaps

at the receiving docks, running the night shift or the team

picking the fresh goods – you want the right tools for your team

to reach sustainable performance, and for yourself access to

information that makes it possible to set individual goals and

monitor team workload and throughput.

You need decision support to make necessary adjustments

before a potential bottleneck becomes a real problem.

Getting it done

As stated earlier, dealing with high volume should be a core

competence of the WMS. The basic philosophy must be to pull

products out of the warehouse based on inventory strategies,

customer priorities and shipping schedules, and to avoid

manual waving (or use it only when you need that).

Ensure process quality Transactions in the WMS needs to be designed to help your

team avoid mistakes. All scans are to be validated in real-time.

For consistent customer service, the solution should support

earliest and latest times for starting and finishing tasks to help

you control that all activities meet their deadlines.

Labor efficiency and resource utilization An important part of how you are measured is probably

performance relative to standards, and how well you assign

your team to perform productive work. Make sure the WMS

helps you automate task priorities and assignments for the key

processes

Workload and queue monitoring Throughput relies not only on data processing, but on the right

staff and equipment being available at the right time. And

getting the right priorities to help you plan the workload in a

dynamic environment. The WMS can provide the aids to help

you prioritize tasks, change staff work zone allocations, and

follow progress.

Employee performance analysis

All tasks are recorded with planned and actual duration, and are

the basis for calculating KPIs that help you not only to analyze

task durations, but also monitor employee performance in

terms of absolute volumes handled and time spent versus

standard.

The thinking is you should spend less time chasing people, and

spend more energy on developing and improving working

procedures.


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WAREHOUSE WORKER What do you need to perform at your best? First, you want the

IT solution to support and not restrict you when executing your

tasks. You want quick response times and access to the right

information.

If you are a high-performing picker, you want precise

instructions and immediate response. If you work all across the

warehouse as a lift truck driver, you want to be able to trust the

system to give you the right tasks and priorities, but perhaps

also have the freedom to override (e g to pick up an alternative

pallet from a floor location when the one you were told to get

is ‘in the middle’). And you certainly want to get your individual

feedback on how you perform to make sure you are correctly

paid.

Ease of use

All screens, whether PC workbenches or streamlined UIs for

handhelds, should be designed to be easy to learn, giving you

access to the right information.

No mistakes

The WMS should guide you to perform the appropriate steps

in each process, and to collect the required data for complete

transactions. You will increase your accuracy and be able to

focus on productive work.

Individual profiles

Where can I work? What can I do? How skilled am I? All these

questions are part of setting up your profile in the system.

This means you will get tasks assigned accordingly. If you are a

beginner, you might just be allowed to pick one order at a time.

If you are experienced, you may perform cluster picking across

four-five orders in the same pick walk.

Getting the system out on the floor

The operation usually settles for transaction control using one

standard technology, like case picking with voice terminals

and full pallet picking via lift truck RF terminals and scanners.

But methods and equipment can also be mixed and matched

with user needs, with the underlying idea to make functionality

available where needed. If you need to look up a purchase

order in the receiving process, you should be able to do

so using your handheld. If you need a pick location to be

replenished, trigger it via your voice terminal.

Individual performance feedback

You don’t want to be measured against incorrect data. The WMS

can provide you with access to your individual performance

data so you can validate that your performance is reflected

accurately in the system of records.

If we agree that the above is important, then you can go out

and trust the system – it will help you perform better!

WAREHOUSE ANALYST You have the task of making the system play according to the

overall supply chain and production strategies. Configuration of

the WMS is your home ground, making sure that the system is

set to support the warehouse operation to run with minimum

waste of resource time and warehouse space, and without

queues and shortages.

To predict and plan what impact new products, layout changes

and production methods will have is important, but also to look

for fine-tuning of standard times and workflows.


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Flexible configuration

You need a broad range of options available to adapt workflows

to product properties, warehouse locations and equipment

used. And you want to put all warehouses in the same system

to take advantage of shared master data and still treat each

facility as unique in terms of layout, workflows, resources and

integrations.

Verify and tune settings

The WMS should include a multitude of triggering events

and process monitors to make sure that the right tasks are

prioritized and dispatched to the right user and equipment. But

you also need to be able to follow what happens in real-time

monitoring screens and record comparative data about when

tasks are actually started and finished versus when they were

planned to be started or finished.

Analyze tasks and standard times

Every activity in the WMS should be logged with start and finish

time stamps, and include equipment, product, order, user and

other dimensions. These allow for analysis of trends, expected

durations versus actual times, jobs started or ended early/late

etc.

In all, a good WMS will provide you with the flexibility to

adapt to local conditions, and help you verify that the setup is

optimal.

IT MANAGER Managing a WMS from an IT perspective is a tough task. You

are challenged with demands for more up-time, increasing

transaction volumes, wireless networks and more peripherals.

Not to mention integration to different systems and equipment.

When the WMS stops, the operation stops. So you must deliver

capacity, reliability and stability. Also when the operation

changes equipment, introduces new functionality or opens a

new site. What can a strong WMS do for you?

24*7

Of course, it needs to be designed for all-day operations. No

shutting down for back-up or batch jobs.

Scalability

If you are in a smaller environment you might prefer running a

standard Windows server, if you operate a bigger data center

balancing the load across a heap of UNIX processors. And it

is your choice whether to run all sites in one system, or use a

distributed model with e g one server per DC.

Flexible deployment

The WMS provider should allow choices for you to deploy the

system using your own IT organization and your preferred

hardware. Or you may select to run the application as a service

with guaranteed availability.

Quick implementation

Make sure the WMS that can be rolled out quickly across your

network of sites and servers, with tools to support upgrades

and data conversion to minimize downtime.


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Integration

Web services API, flat files or EDI? The system should be open

to let you choose the mechanisms you want to use, and fit with

you integration strategy e g in a service-oriented architecture.

The solution must be available. You should not be wakening up

by calls from the night shift. Look for references to check that

the provider can guarantee a very stable and reliable solution.

CLIENT ACCOUNT MANAGERS As a manager of a 3PL client you need access to information

that measures the overall performance of the operation, and

allows you to (1) create the right reports and KPIs regarding

produced services to present to the client, and (2) analyze the

effort it takes to produce the requested services (in order to

cost and price based on activity drivers).

Throughput volumes

By client, product, client’s customers and vendors provide

you with handled volumes in your preferred unit of measure

(orders, lines, pallets, cases, weight, volume, etc).

Storage volumes

Actual inventory levels, space utilization and turns are

calculated and readily available for your preferred time

intervals.

Process quality

On-time, accuracy and completeness makes up perfect

receiving and perfect shipping measurements. Prove that you

live up to the contract, and prove that bad quality in means

bad quality out (or more cost).

In all, a solid model for activity based costing makes you

equipped to manage your accounts and continue to develop

the business with your clients.

KEY PROCESS BENEFITS For reference, below are some key process features to look for

when judging how well a WMS offering can help you achieve

streamlined workflows, configurability to fit different layouts

and industries, and compliance with standard concepts like

SSCC (Serialized Shipping Container Code) license plates and

GTIN (Global Trade Item Number) bar codes.

INBOUND PROCESSESReceiving

• Directed workflow

• Real-time validation and updates

• Exception handling

Quality control

• Random checks

• Vendor scorecards

• Hold policies

Put-away

• Directed

• Optimizing space utilization

Flow-through

• Planned cross-docking

• Opportunistic cross-docking

• Replenishment round


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OUTBOUND PROCESSESPicking & packing

• Wave planning for automatic or manual release

• Streamlined execution

• Support alternative picking techniques (paper, RF, voice,

automated)

• Support alternative picking strategies (fixed or floating

locations with dynamic slotting,

• pre-picking, kit picking, multiple pickers per order,

multiple orders per picker etc)

• Merge/Consolidate as part of the process

• Random checks (of picking accuracy)

• Real-time monitoring

Staging and shipping

• Departure scheduling

• Dock allocation

• Load planning (with visibility into all planned picks and

cross-dock units)

• Late changes

• Carrier compliance

Customer and Client compliance

• Kitting

• Assembly

• Labeling

SUPPORTING PROCESSESTask management

• Optimized movement tasks

• Task interleaving

• Dynamic task priorities

• Workload and queue monitoring

Inventory control

• License plates

• Inventory balances (item loads, load carriers, items)

• Inventory audits

• Holds

Flexible warehouse configuration

• Warehouses

• Areas

• Zones

• Locations

• Travel paths

• Product characteristics

• Clients

Integration

• Web services

• Host integration

• Equipment integration

• Transportation integration

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WHITEPAPER WHAT TO EXPECT FROM YOUR WMS?

SUMMARYA WMS helps companies increase profitability, effectiveness

and efficiency by faster and timelier movement of products

through the supply chain with minimum handling of goods

and maximum throughput of orders. This – along with highly

efficient labor deployment, optimized space utilization and

cost effective receiving and picking processes – results in

reduced operating costs.

A good WMS implemented in the right way, is a guarantee

for high operational reliability, scalability and flexibility,

supporting:

• Superior picking and shipping control for excellent

customer service.

• Usage of detailed advance shipping notice (ASN)

message structures and handling of goods based on ASN

and/or order information.

• Automatic identification of goods handled in the supply

chain node.

• Resource optimization across space, equipment and staff.

• 100% mobility in warehouse operations via usage of

voice recognition technology and radio frequency

equipment for receiving, movement, picking and

shipping activities.

• Flow-through pool point operations with cross-docking

of transit goods.

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ACRONYMS USEDASN Advanced Shipping Notice

DC Distribution Center

EDI Electronic Data Interchange

IT Information Technology

KPI Key Performance Indicator

PC Personal Computer

RF Radio Frequency

RFID Radio Frequency IDentification

3PL Third Party Logistics

UI User Interface

WMS Warehouse Management System

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More than 5,000 customers around the world rely on Aptean to give them a competitive edge. By providing innovative, industry-driven enterprise application software, Aptean helps businesses to satisfy their customers, operate more efficiently, and stay at the forefront of their industry.

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what to expect from your wms?

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