Choosing the right warehouse management system for your manual warehouse is an important job and rightly so, as it can bring significant benefits. From faster goods receipt and putaway, to aiding more accurate picking and packing, improvements in stock flow through to better stock control. Get the choice wrong however and it can lead to goods receipt delays, stock movement congestion, out of stocks in picking and late despatches. So what are 5 essential tips for making sure you pick the right system?
- Understand the pricing options available. There are numerous ways to purchase software ranging from purchasing licences, local site installation and implemention, through to hosted software solutions paying fixed monthly fees or monthly pay as you use. In many cases you will use the software for 24 months+ and now you have the choice on how to finance over the medium and long term. Also fully understand the support terms, the extras you pay for and what the likelihood is you will need all these extras. Reference sites and existing customers will give you a guide. If you think you’ll end up having to pay for support site visits and on-going bespoke work, report tailoring and new interface feeds then factor this in to your pricing. Remember that some vendors (such as us) roll out free upgrade options throughout the year and are open to discussing new functionality.
- Review your key processes and check how they work before you buy. Purchasing a warehouse system isn’t just a tick box exercise checking to see if certain functionality exists or not. It is important to see how the functionality works and the impact on your operation. Restricted goods receipt and putaway rules, inefficient truck movements and picking tasks, limited packing, marshalling and despatch functionality all produce bottlenecks or slow down the workforce considerably. Over the last 25+ years we’ve seen numerous vendor systems “lose” pallets, grind goods receipt and despatch to a halt, picking and packing operations waiting for stock or become congested as stock doesn’t arrive timely, stock movements being unable to cope with the physical building constraints and much more! Whilst problems can often be systematically solved be aware there are many costs involved for finding out and resolving these issues.
- Check what information is required to go into and needs to come out of the system. Spend time understanding your system interface, import and export requirements. This includes operational reports, management information, key data fields required for existing reporting packages, despatch, financial and billing information. If you’re intending to use new reports to help manage the business compare this to the current information used and understand how this will change with the new system. Again over the years we have seen many vendor system implementations where reporting and import/export functionality is critical to the business however has not been understood well prior to implementation.
- Consider what the warehouse system actually measures and what it does not. Warehouse systems are often bought and sold based on labour management modules. This term however covers a wide range of functionality from recording completed job tasks and movements through to capturing this data at individual and group level, adding measurement calculations and working out efficiency rates. Furthermore there are often areas of the operation that are not accounted for. Even for the parts of the operation that are, understanding how they relate to budget targets, cost to serve, value added services or other important financial considerations can be unclear. So it is important to realise what you are getting and what you need prior to purchasing.
- Analyse your internal support requirements. Based on the type of solution you opt for i.e. local installation or software as a service etc, work out the likely internal support requirements. This may include local IT staff to handle first line support calls, manage the local network including fixing any radio frequency or voice headset issues, completing database administration or server support tasks. It also means looking at how you manage data e.g. setting up new product information and stock rules associated with new products, setting up and managing employee data, managing incomplete and old work tasks and resolving interface errors. Additionally documenting standard procedures for all aspects of the system and operation, plus maintaining them as the business changes, requires additional support and is critical to help with quality control and training. The latter can be particularly important for new joins, temporary workers and coping with work peaks.