In a warehouse, there is always a lot of activity, no matter the time of year. During peak periods, there is constant picking and packing. The quieter periods give you time to, for example, take inventory and perform quality checks. The warehouse will always be the beating heart of the business when you need to ship products. That’s why you must always think about how you can further optimize the warehouse. One obvious optimization is warehouse locations. Thanks to warehouse locations, you can move products and easily find them again in the warehouse.
Benefits of Warehouse Locations
If you want to optimize the warehouse, you’d better make use of warehouse locations. Why? Simply because you can associate products with warehouse locations, so you always know where the products are. If you work with a smart inventory management system, you can go even further. A smart WMS system will take warehouse locations into account when picking multiple orders. The WMS system will plan the most efficient route through the warehouse. This means you won’t be running around unnecessarily. Warehouse employees will cover less distance, leading to less fatigue and, consequently, fewer errors. This also means that you can process more orders within the same time frame! Always think carefully before hiring additional manpower. A simple optimization can allow your employees to process a lot more orders.
Moving Products Can Lead to Errors
Warehouse locations are crucial to quickly finding products. Imagine the following situation: a customer orders a product that you have stored in multiple locations, namely A, B, and C. According to the inventory, you still have one product in stock. You check locations A and B, but no products are found. A mistake in the system? Always possible! You contact the customer to inform them that the product is out of stock. The likelihood of cancellation is high… However, what you forgot is that the last item is stored at location C. Unfortunately, you’ve already lost the order and missed out on revenue. Thanks to warehouse locations, you will always know which product is at which location, preventing such mistakes.
Moving Products in the Warehouse with a WMS System
As mentioned, there is always activity in a warehouse. During these activities, warehouse employees move products around the warehouse. Why? There are several reasons to move products. Here are three reasons that may sound familiar to you.
- Many warehouses work with overstock. This overstock needs to be stored at a specific location. It’s important that this location also has a warehouse location so you can quickly find the overstock. When regular stock is running low, you need to replenish it with overstock. To do this efficiently, you need to transfer products from one warehouse location to another. This way, you always know how many products are at each location.
- A WMS system will undoubtedly show which products are the most popular. Based on this data, you can move certain products. You can move the most popular products to warehouse locations near the packing tables. This way, warehouse employees will cover less distance and process more orders.
- When a new delivery of a product comes in, the current warehouse location may become too small. At this point, you can decide to move the entire stock to another location.
Thanks to a smart inventory management system like Webship Online, you can quickly move products and always know where they are. If you had to keep track of this information in Excel, the chances of errors would be high! Want to test such a system? Contact Webship Online at hallo@webship.online and try the WMS system for free!
