Establishing a WMS Return On Investment

A warehouse management solution is often a large investment for most businesses. For this reason, if you are starting to investigate a warehouse management solution for your business, it’s always important to look at what return you will get for this investment. Returns can be measured by:

• Whether you will make your money back,
• whether it will improve the processes and efficiencies of your business, or
• how much the key metrics and improvements are in businesses in terms of warehousing pick rate. i.e. How staff are able to move throughout the warehouse, select items to be picked, and then, of course, pick those items.

Pick Speed Increased

For Cloud Coders, we’ve been able to increase the pick speed for our customers from anywhere between 17% to 35%, ensuring a massive increase in the speed in which they’re able to go through their processes. This comes from two specific places. One, the ability to have the warehouse mapped out, and specific locations outlined within the application itself, as well as the speed in which people can go through and select items and pick them electronically with our mobile device.

Stock Take Speed Increased

The second key element of this process is stocktaking. Stocktakes are often a laborious process, that for warehouse staff, is sometimes not necessary. They can take a long period of time and time out of the day where staff could be performing other functions. It’s also, however, a great balance check to see where all the stock is and to make sure that you’re on top of where that stock is and how much you have within the warehouse itself. For us, we’ve been able to increase the speed in which these stocktakes are completed from anywhere from 20 to 40% in increased speed. This is a massive increase, and allow stocktakes to be completed more frequently, meaning that you’re always on top of what stock is in your warehouse, because you have that added time, and you don’t have that constant time pressure when trying to complete a stocktake due to increased speed.

Return Rate Reduced

The third, another extremely important point to look at, in regards to improvements to warehouses is the rate of return, which is a direct reflection of mispicks. With our solution, we’ve been able to reduce the average return rate by 30%, with a lot of our customers having an actual mispick or return rate of anywhere from zero to 0.1%. Meaning a lot of our customers, are almost eliminating mispicks all together. This, once again, is due to the ability of our solution to create audible and visible cues when an incorrect item is selected by a picker. They will be able to see that an item is incorrect by scanned the barcode.

Realising that it’s incorrect, they would then have to go and select the correct item to continue on that pick process. These visual and audio cues are fantastic. As we all know, people don’t want to make mistakes, but it can always occur in a high-pressure environment when selecting a lot of items, especially if they look very similar. Our solution, removes that problem, allows the pickers to get on with the task at hand, which is picking and packing items, ready to go out to the customers or the end-users.

Key Metrics For Improvement

These three key metrics are what we look to improve within businesses. It allows for greater clarity around inventory, reduces costly mispicks and reduces manual processes. Being able to reduce these often simple errors and improve efficiencies of the workers within the warehouse means they are happy because they’re picking the right items, they’re being able to move through the warehouse quickly, and they’re able to complete stocktakes quickly.

For the managers of warehouses, it’s important to then understand the cost savings from the reduction in mispicks and the improved time to complete things such as stocktakes and picks, all improving the bottom line of the company.

We Value Our Customers

Cloud Coders has always been about providing value to our customers, whether that is through our knowledge or through the improved processes and time that everybody is getting back simply by using our cloud WMS solution. We always aim to give this back to our customers, and we’ll continue to do so.

If you would like to learn more about cloud WMS, or if you are dealing with any of these factors within your business and would like to improve them, please get in touch. Until then, take care.

If you would like to learn how our Cloud WMS could benefit your business or even if you have questions around Cloud Coders in general, please contact us today.