When it comes to managing warehouse operations, efficiency and accuracy are the major aspects. The last thing you want to do is sit around with your team wondering how you can make warehouse management easier.

That’s why it’s important to understand the top warehouse management challenges and find out how you can address them in order to improve productivity, performance, and profitability throughout your warehouse.

What is the Warehouse management process ?

According to Forbes, “A warehouse management system (WMS) is a type of software that is widely used in the manufacturing and retail industries because it tracks all materials and goods as they come in and go out of the warehouse. In basic terms, a WMS helps optimize all your warehouse processes.”

Here are most common challenges and how you can overcome them in order to ensure success.

Biggest Challenges of Warehouse Management

Lack of Order Management

The lack of structure, rules, and organization within a warehouse is evident in its inability to effectively manage stock. New orders are placed on top of old ones, making it difficult for employees to locate the right items. If a certain product is needed urgently by customers, there is also no guarantee that it will be located quickly enough for delivery.

A warehouse management solution can help to integrate inventory control with your warehousing processes. The advanced solutions will allow for rapid product location lookups, by receiving real-time data processing.

In addition to improving overall efficiency, an order management system can also help to reduce employee error as well as physical searching time and errors.

2) Human Resource costs

The cost of human resources can vary depending on a number of factors. The more units of product you handle per day, for example, will mean that it costs more to hire warehouse workers to work shifts around your business schedule.

Warehouse management solutions help reduce labour costs by automating much of warehouse operations, thus reducing hours lost to idle time and optimizing productivity through digital tracking. The software can be customized to meet your own needs so that you no longer need a full-time staff member to help keep your warehouse in order.

3) Streamline workflow process

The need for employees to perform redundant processes wastes a lot of time, increases human error, slows down productivity and can even prove dangerous when employees are rushing. This issue is easily solved by automating these redundant tasks into integrated software solutions designed specifically for warehousing.

The benefits include increased speed, greater accuracy and less worker fatigue or injury from performing repetitive tasks. Another way to address these issues is through predictive analysis technology that integrates data from across operations with real-time machine condition information so you can anticipate problems before they arise.

4) Security

Due to its high value, security is one of your greatest concerns as a warehouse manager. Warehouses are complex structures, with different departments requiring different levels of security. From full CCTV control, off-site protection services, fire alarms or even background checks for employees.

Moreover, Surveillance, Closed-circuit television (CCTV), alarm systems and biometric identification systems are all ways to secure your facility.

However, just having these items isn’t enough. They have to be maintained, upgraded when necessary, used properly and monitored consistently. A security audit can be a useful aspect for uncovering weaknesses in your facility’s current system or for opting for innovative solutions.

5) Quality Control

Quality control is one of those warehouse management tasks that’s never-ending, regardless of whether you have thousands or hundreds of thousands of products. It might not be too difficult at first; spot-checking each product to ensure it matches its corresponding paperwork will help with catching any errors early on.

As time goes on, though, maintaining quality control can become more challenging. For example, you might have warehouses in multiple locations – that means multiple sets of inventory records that need to match up for accuracy and consistency across locations.

How to manage quality control in warehouses?

In order to overcome this challenge, warehouse software solutions come as a resume for the companies. It helps to streamline the workflow processes and minimize the risk factors.

Warehouse software solution is a comprehensive, flexible approach to managing inventory in an omnichannel operation. It’s imperative that your warehouse software system includes quality control features that provide thorough audits of warehouse activity.

These solutions can catch errors quickly, providing valuable analytics on inventory levels as well as optimizing logistics planning so you never run out of stock.

Conclusion

Every business is driven by its core operations. If they aren’t running smoothly, business can be affected extensively. Hence, opting for the warehouse management system can help to improve efficiency, accuracy, and reliability in a cost-effective way.