Embarking on the journey to identify the right Warehouse Management System (WMS) and vendor can be a daunting task. A WMS can bring a level of automation to greatly improve the efficiency of your business. If your operation is experiencing issues like frequent inventory inaccuracies, complex order fulfilment processes, high picking and packing times, poor visibility into stock levels, growing order volume, or a need to streamline overall warehouse efficiency and reduce errors, especially if you are dealing with a large number of SKUs or diverse product types, then then it might be time to start that journey.
The first part of this blog is to establish what you need a WMS to do. In subsequent blogs, we will consider ERP interface, Cloud or on-premise hosting.
Establishing The Requirements
There are many vendors to choose from, and many offering the same functionality and at varying price points!
Before you entertain going to the market, you should establish what you need from a WMS. No one knows your business better than you. Undertake a series of ‘Day in the Life Of’ sessions whereby you map out what the operation is doing at any given point in your intralogistics. Identify the activity and if that activity could be enhanced, i.e., how could it be better or more efficient? Some activities will be essential (A) for the operation, others highly desirable (B), to nice to have (C) or not required (D).
By scoping out all the activities and rating them as per the categories before, you will have developed a Functionality Matrix that will form the backbone of your requirements.
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