After months of marketing effort, traffic to your new e-commerce website is ramping up along with online orders.
Your marketing team expects to further increase sales by optimising the website for increased conversion rates. This is good news. However, is your paper-based warehouse management up to the task?
Handling the extra business may prove costly when warehouse inefficiencies get in the way of timely and accurate order fulfilment. A warehouse management system (WMS) can help you analyse and identify bottlenecks. Unlike a paper-based system, a WMS gives quick access to much more data and readily presents it in easy to read charts and graphs. This allows you to quickly spot and correct warehouse inefficiencies.
Another problem with paper is that it doesn’t provide a real-time inventory count and it won’t keep pace with your website order processing capacity. Your old warehouse system itself becomes the bottleneck. At some point, you won’t know if you have the inventory to continue accepting orders. If you stop taking orders, your frustrated customers will take their business elsewhere. On the other hand, accepting orders that you don’t have inventory for will cause you to lose customers later.
Yet another problem with paper-based warehouse management is it lacks the batch and wave picking capabilities of warehouse management software. These capabilities maximise picking, packing, and shipping operations with the least movement of workers and forklifts. Rather than pick and pack orders one at a time, the WMS will direct workers to pick multiple orders at the same time. This eliminates a lot of wasteful and tiring back and forth movement.
Your business is only as good as its weakest link. An e-commerce store that rapidly processes orders combined with great marketing that brings in lots of online customers won’t matter if your paper-based warehouse management isn’t up to it. Optimise your warehouse operations with a good warehouse management system. Contact us for more information.
