The emerging trends in WMS systems
The warehouse has changed its form from a static storage facility to a unit which uses virtually real-time data to closely match supply to demand, eliminate the need to hold excess inventory, and increase the flow of goods throughout the supply chain. A such there is a greater need these days to have a warehouse management system (WMS) to manage company’s postponement strategy to delay the customization of products until after the products, or a set of common components, have left the manufacturing plant.
The software market for WMS has consequently become more and more competitive and as such the packages are competing with each other to address more and more customer needs such as more intricate advanced shipping notice (ASN)/radio frequency (RF) receiving, lot/expiration control, location/carton selection, wave building, labor planning, advanced kitting, wave templates, material selection, compliance labeling, picking/packing, cluster/batch picking, serial number capture, catch-weight capture, cycle counting, task management, replenishment, container tracking, cross docking, report generation, shipping paperwork, automated rule checking, carton selection, etc.
Now-a-days, a typical WMS solution has evolved from merely storage and retrieval of inventory to strategies which increase throughput and productivity by managing a full range of warehouse resources to effectively manage common warehouse business processes and direct warehouse activities. The typical functions addressed by a WMS system include the following:
1. The receiving function which encompasses the physical receipt of material, the inspection of the shipment for conformance with the purchase order [i.e., quantity and damage], the identification and delivery to destination, and the preparation of receiving reports
2. The put-away function which involves removing the material from the dock (or other location of receipt), transporting the material to a storage area, placing that material in a staging area and then moving it to a specific location, and recording the movement and identification of the location where the material has been placed.
3. Order picking which includes selecting or “picking” the required quantity of specific products for movement to a packaging area (usually in response to one or more shipping orders) and documenting that the material was moved from one location to shipping
4. Staging and consolidated shipping which involves physically moving material from the packing area to a staging area, based on a prescribed set of instructions related to a particular outbound vehicle or delivery route, often for shipment consolidation purposes
5. Inventory cycle counting where inventory is counted on a cyclic schedule rather than once a year.
Thus, WMS applications traditionally automate activities that fall within the four walls of a warehouse, such as receiving, put-away, serialization, picking, packing, and shipping.
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