ERP System to Help Improve Pick, Pack, and Ship
How an ERP System Can Help Your Pick, Pack and Ship Activities
The productivity of a warehouse is crucial within the supply chain; it can make or break a company’s bottom line. The goal is to keep customers satisfied and the businesses running seamlessly. It is critical that we periodically review these operations to see if these are operating as efficiently as possible. A good ERP system can help! Read on for some essential tips on how to improve your warehouse and shipping activities.
Organize the Warehouse and Workstations
- How organized are your goods?
- What methodology did you utilize?
Organizing your warehouse improves productivity and maximizes efficiency. It should be designed for speed, accountability and ensure accuracy. There are several strategies to maximize productivity, including implementing a methodical location numbering system to easily identify a specific warehouse location – based on position, level, bay, aisle, and zone. These locations can be tracked in an ERP system using bin locations. You will have real-time information on the material available in each bin while saving time.
You can also de-clutter the warehouse by enforcing the ‘5s’ methodology (Sort – Set in order – Shine – Standardize – Sustain). Another proven warehouse organization strategy involves designing workstations according to the characteristics of the worker and specific tasks. This improves productivity and minimizes the risk of workplace illnesses or injuries.
Use a Velocity-Based Layout
Traditional product placement layouts, such as grouping products based on the manufacturer or the type of product, are largely inefficient and time-consuming. Instead, you can improve your effectiveness by implementing a velocity-based layout in your warehouse strategy.
By placing the frequently picked products closer to the shipping area, warehouse staff can easily and quickly pick the items on demand. Additionally, warehouse managers should consider integrating the packing and shipping stations to free up space and streamline the fulfillment process.
Powerful reporting capabilities within an ERP system can help provide your warehouse manager the tools necessary to plan, arrange and adapt. By running a report of historical shipments, one can obtain the information that is needed in order to determine the optimal locations for storing each item.
Streamline Workflows
- How do all of your warehouse resources fit together?
- Or better yet, how do you identify gaps in the processes?
Warehouse managers can determine how departmental workflow and scheduling affect operations by creating a visual map. This allows you to understand how things are working, including the health of the warehouse layout, storage of different materials, and handling of items. Simply put, streamlining workflows through visual mapping is like creating a well-oiled machine.
One very useful feature is the capability to generate paperless and optimal picklists for your warehouse employees. Many companies just have their shipping people pick the items in the order provided in the original sales order. But sometimes this can result in a warehouse employee constantly travelling back and forth from one side of the warehouse to the other. But some ERP systems can generate an optimized picklist where the picking order is based upon the location of the item. These systems can improve efficiency by minimizing the travel a warehouse employee needs to gather all the items.
Measure Results and Review Effectiveness
You can’t have 2020 vision for your warehouse strategy if you don’t measure and review the results. It’s important to analyze and gauge how you’re utilizing available resources.
- What is the flow of goods in and out of the warehouse?
- Are there any inefficiencies in the chain that may negatively affect the bottom line?
While analyzing the effectiveness of a warehouse, it’s essential to review the whole process – there’s no point in improving one system when another is lagging.
Your sales mix can vary from season to season or from year to year. It is important that you continually review your operations to ensure you are optimizing for what you will be shipping in the future and not just what you shipped in the past. An ERP system with a powerful MRP system can provide visibility into what is coming up ahead so you can prepare for materials on-hand and store it in your warehouse where it can be easily pick, packed and shipped.
Leverage Technology
Nowadays, there are tons of technologies designed to improve accuracy and increase productivity in a warehouse. Some of these tools include bin tracking, pick-to-label, bar codes, integrated CRM processes, and advanced inventory tracking methods.
Having an advanced bar code capability within your ERP system can be extremely helpful in making your shipping activities as efficient as possible. Not only will it save time, but perhaps more important, it will limit and reduce human errors. Shipping the wrong product to a customer because someone picked the wrong material can be tremendously costly and negatively impact the goodwill you have with your customer. A good bar code capability integrated with your ERP system can save you, oftentimes the initial cost of implementation.
Conclusion
As we shared in our previous blog, providing integrations with the leading shipping software companies is an example of My Office Apps commitment to incorporate innovative features using partnerships and smart algorithms in the Kechie ERP solution to help make our clients more efficient and profitable. With the help of a great Warehouse Management System like Kechie®, you can integrate several real-time systems to ensure the seamless flow of data and efficient movement of goods in the warehouse. This leads to lowered costs, space management, increased accuracy, and easier analysis of results.
Our goal is to provide the best solutions for small and medium-sized businesses utilizing the latest best practices techniques in order to contribute to the success of our customers.
For more information on shipping and the Kechie ERP software, you can visit My Office Apps, or better yet, call us at (714) 486-1487 and ask us to schedule a demo so we can show how we can help solve your business issues you face, both today and tomorrow.
Optimize Your ERP System with a Shipment Management Software
Save Money by Optimizing Your ERP System with a Shipment Management Software
You’ve worked hard to create, promote, and source a product and all that effort has turned into purchase orders. But the celebration can be short lived if shipping costs eat into your profit margins. Is it cost effective to invest more administrative resources to figure out the best way of getting your hard earned orders shipped?
The complexity of finding the most cost effective shipper or trucker is quite significant and many questions need to be answered:
- Which carriers can deliver to my different customers?
- Which carrier has the best cost but still deliver on time?
- Who can optimize less than load (LTL) freight?
- How do I get a quantity discount?
- How do I create the appropriate shipping labels for each carrier?
- How do I coordinate the pickup and deliveries with so many different carriers?
- How can I mix-and-match carriers to optimize the cost and service on a customer-by-customer and order-by-order basis?
Fortunately, by integrating high quality software with your ERP system you can not only answer these questions but simplify your shipping activities to make them easier and less expensive.
When evaluating shipping and trucking management software make sure it is designed to connect your business to all the major truckers and carriers including FedEx, UPS, DHL, and USPS as well as other smaller, yet cost effective alternatives. The software acts as an intermediary between your company and these carriers. By leveraging all their customers’ shipping volume, they can negotiate significant discounts that will be passed on to you.
Leading shipping and trucking management software allows you to quickly compare pricing in real time so you can pick the most cost-effective shipping method for each order. Not only will this save you on shipping costs, it will also save administrative headaches.
The shipping software consolidates all the carriers through one common user interface. You will only need to set up one account through the shipping software and not with each individual carrier. This eliminates the need to manage an account and password on each carrier’s website and learn their different order entry systems.
Not only does this simplify shipping each order it also makes it easy to receive, pay, and track the multiple invoices from different carriers that require separate payments.
Recognizing the value and expertise that shipping management software provides, My Office Apps has formed partnerships with the industry leading shipping and trucking management software suppliers. We have built a seamless integration of our Kechie ERP with their software to make it extremely easy to utilize their consolidated shipment capabilities.
With a built-in interface from Kechie ERP to these transportation experts, you can request shipments directly from the Kechie Shipping module. When you are picking an order, you simply click a button called “Ship Using” and select the shipping or transportation software company as the carrier. The order will be automatically transferred to the third party company and they will send back a tracking number and the shipping cost which will be stored in Kechie with the order.
Any required shipping labels will be printed out on your own printers. All your team needs to do is to box up the order, attach the shipping labels, wait for the carrier, and send out your own invoice to your end customer once the order ships.Providing integrations with the leading shipping software companies is an example of My Office Apps commitment to incorporate innovative features using partnerships and smart algorithms in the Kechie ERP solution to help make our clients more efficient and profitable.
Our goal is to provide the best solutions for small and medium sized businesses using the latest techniques in order to contribute to the success of our customers.
For more information on shipping and the Kechie ERP software, you can visit www.myofficeapps.com or better yet, call us at (714) 486-1487 and ask us to schedule a demo so we can show how we can help solve your business issues you face, both today and tomorrow.