What is the purpose of a Warehouse Management System (WMS)?
Think of a Warehouse Management System or WMS as a CRM for your products. A WMS allows you to know where your products are coming from, where they are and where they are going.
A CRM for Products
A tracker for your goods throughout your process which allows you to have timely updates on any stock or SKU that is running low or in other words, which of your products have been performing exceedingly well.
If you’re in the business dealing with perishable goods, a WMS system will be able to equip your team with necessary information to pick-and-pack goods with the earliest expiration dates or to avoid picking goods that are too near to an expiration date.
On top of being a map and guide for your team, the true potential of a WMS comes from its integration between marketplaces and systems. Just like how a great CRM reduces friction and provides alignment between teams, a great WMS would allow seamless communication between the many different shopping platforms you may be on: Shopify, Shoppee, Amazon, Lazada, Magento, etc.
Allowing you to Scale
With a WMS implemented, it allows you the ability to scale smartly and optimize your processes of:
- Inbounding / Receiving. Making sure the right quantity arrives in the right conditions as stated on the inbound log.
- Put-away. Moving your goods into the storage.
- Storage. Tagging your goods in storage for easy and accurate picking.
- Picking. Ability to collect the correct items to fulfill sales orders.
- Packing. Pack your goods accurately with any special instructions or packaging materials or marketing collaterals.
- Delivering / Shipping. Process shipment to delivery providers to pick up for customers to receive their orders on time.
Once you have processes as such in place, you are ready to ramp up marketing and selling efforts to move product efficiently and effectively to your customers.
Scale Up
As you grow within your market and region, you may start exploring expansion strategies into other regions and markets.
This is where you’d see another value in having a WMS in place. As you start expanding into other regions, it makes good business sense to have a local fulfillment center for the region. What we’ve seen over our many years in this industry is having 3 main central locations of fulfillment: APAC, EMEA, NAM.
By having a WMS, you would then be able to connect and communicate with the other fulfillment centers and have a dashboard of how your products are doing in each region and market, and if you need to move products between the different regions.
This way you’re able to deliver your goods to your customers with a reduction in lead time to provide the best customer experience to your customers – not to mention the reduction in delivery cost from a more localized fulfillment center.
Delivering Great Customer Experience
We can go on about how having a great WMS would increase efficiency and productivity, increase picking accuracy, reduce your order lead time and rate of product return and even increase your inventory turnover. But at the end of the day, you’re looking for a service provider that will help you deliver great customer experiences to your customers.
If delivering great customer experience is an important part of achieving your success, drop us a message today and we can share with you our experience in delivering great customer experiences to our customers and their customers.