News

American Fastener Journal, March/April 2005

With skyrocketing labor and logistics costs and constant pressure on margins, warehouse efficiency is a must. Distributors searching for a way to control overhead while improving accuracy and integrity in their warehouses should consider investing in a wireless warehouse management solution. Designed to streamline and organize processes, a wireless warehouse can help distributors improve picking, packing, put-away, and receiving processes through directed activities.

How It Benefits You

When your pickers move through the warehouse to prepare orders for shipment, do they know exactly where to go to choose products in a logical manner? Or do they move from aisle A to N, and then back to J for the next item on the list? Can they choose orders for more than one customer at a time? And, as they work, do they carry messy stacks of paperwork through your warehouse and mark products off with a pencil as they pick them?

Wireless warehouse functionality allows you to modernize all of these processes. In addition to electronically guiding your employees through the warehouse, a wireless warehouse management solution automates tasks and makes everything paperless - allowing your people to focus on choosing the proper products in a timely manner.

Best of all, a true wireless warehouse management solution makes your existing employees incredibly productive by allowing them to pick a single order, multiple orders for different customers, and transfer orders in a single pass through the warehouse. You can also use a wireless warehouse management solution to assign employees specific areas of responsibility in the warehouse. The solution will allow multiple employees to pick the same order at the same time within their respective zones or areas of responsibility. Because they do not have to traverse the entire warehouse for each order, this leads to greater efficiency.

Also, how often are your clerks backlogged because only one person can receive each shipment as it reaches your loading dock? Because it pulls dynamic information from your enterprise software solution - instead of static data from a list on a clipboard - a wireless warehouse management solution streamlines receiving processes by allowing more than one user to receive against the same purchase order or warehouse transfer at the exact same time.

"Because wireless warehouse management tools automate a lot of the tasks many distributors still do with a pencil and clipboard, they can reallocate resources to service-oriented tasks," says Steve Horgan, an executive at NSK Industries, an Ohio-based fastener wholesaler. "This technology has enabled us to add more SKUs to our warehouse and customers to our database without hiring extra employees."

How Does It Work?

A wireless warehouse management solution works by linking your warehouse workers to your enterprise software solution via a wireless handheld device. The device tells your employees where to go to pick, put away, count, or move product within your facility. When they arrive at the correct item, they scan it with the device. This scan interacts directly with your enterprise software solution about the activity, ensuring inventory levels are always recorded properly. Plus, because each movement is recorded, your employees are more accountable for everything that moves out of your warehouse - improving service levels.

Just because the system is fully electronically automated doesn't mean that it is unforgiving. If your order picker accidentally scans in an extra piece, the handheld device should allow them to manually adjust levels - so your system can update inventory counts.

Leveraging Consistency for a Cost-Effective Solution

Many wireless warehouse management solutions now available enable you to access the software in your office from your warehouse. For example, a Windows-based solution - complete with GUI-interfaced scanning "guns" - should enable you to log onto most of the applications in your office - from Microsoft Outlook and Word to your enterprise software solution. This means that your warehouse manager can easily access his desktop to retrieve information about rush shipments without interrupting his normal routine. Some new solutions even allow distributors to extend the wireless network capabilities installed in their offices to their stockrooms.

Because these warehouse management solutions combine front- and back-office technology, you save on system administration costs because there is no need to hire two experts to maintain each solution. Plus, it greatly diminishes the learning curve - as it eliminates the need for your employees to learn two completely different solutions. And, because a Windows-based wireless warehouse management solution retrieves and stores information in the same database as your enterprise software solution, it cuts the risk of data synchronization errors and eliminates any time you might need to spend on maintaining two different solutions.

A wireless warehouse management solution can streamline your processes, improve order accuracy, and make your employees more productive - making your customers happier and you more profitable.

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