Conquering e-Commerce with Dispatcher WMS – Part Four
Conquering E-Commerce with an Advanced WMS – Part Four
So far in this series, we’ve talk about how you can use an advanced WMS to set up your receiving (be that returned goods or not) properly, so it’s easier to be successful later down the line. And we’ve talked about what you can do with that inventory immediately after it’s been received. And then in part three, we talked about other actions you might take on that same inventory while it’s travelling around your warehouse, or over your site, and how those actions can affect your inventory accuracy.
This week, we’re talking about sending that stuff you originally received out into the world.
If you’d like a quick summary of what we’ll cover in this article, watch this video:
For the sake of argument, I’m going to assume that you are using an advanced WMS like Blue Yonder’s Dispatcher WMS, and you’ve set it up so that you know what you’ve received, the state it’s in, how much you have on hand, and exactly where it is.
So, taking all that as said, when you receive an order, and you can receive orders in lots of ways, especially in e-commerce, where omni-channel is the norm, your system needs to be able to do a few things.
It needs to look at what’s required and see if you’ve got some. And then it needs to tell you the best way to get it from where it is now, to the person or business that placed the order.
Simple, huh?
Well, yes. It can be. As an end-user. If your system can do all the heavy lifting to make it that way.
In an ‘eat the elephant one bite at a time’ kind of way, all your operators need to see is the first step, then the next, then the next.
So, for example, you receive an order. Perhaps it’s automatically allocated, or perhaps you do it by hand. Your choice. And when that order is allocated, the system looks at what you’ve got, and then it does a few calculations and works out the best way of fulfilling it.
Perhaps one of your considerations is the shelf life of your inventory – do you need to go full FIFO? Or are there times when you want to do LIFO, or some other flavour of stock rotation?
It it’s FIFO, then your advanced WMS will look at the matching inventory it has available, and then it’ll pick the oldest (so long as it’s in date and not obsolete and matches the various other indicators that you might have set up to suit your operation).
And then it’ll work out the best way to get it from where it is, to where you’re going to ship it out.
That might mean creating a pick face for it, so that you can break down a pallet into whatever tracking level you actually need for the order line.
Or perhaps it knows that this order is going to need repacking (quite frequently this is the case with e-commerce), so it’ll hand out the steps to make that happen, one by one to your operators. It’ll tell them all what to do, and when and where to go from and to. And it can even make sure that they don’t encounter each other on the way (narrow aisle, anyone?).
And then, when the inventory has been repacked, tasks such as vehicle loading can be automatically created, and then assigned. All the labels can have been printed out, all the tasks will have been updated. All the orders that are fulfilled will be ready to ship. And perhaps you’ll ship them automatically, or perhaps you’ll do it by hand.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s basic functionality when it comes to an advanced WMS. It’s a doddle to something like Dispatcher WMS.
To successfully deploy a WMS that’s going to give you the kind of return on investment that makes it worth the time, energy and money to implement, you really need two things:
- A WMS that makes all of the above (and more!) possible.
- A team who knows how to implement it quickly, efficiently, and effectively, because they’ve done it many times before, in pretty much every industry, all over the world.
The reason you need good software is self-evident.
The reason you need a good team, while obvious, is perhaps a little more complex.
It’s partly because it saves time, so you can save money. And it’s partly to set things up right, so it’s easier to make money once you go live.
If your installation partners have done this before (repeatedly), then you’re not paying them to work out the simple things. You’re not paying them to deliver the basics. You’re not paying for their training, as they fumble through configuring a system that has – frankly – thousands of permutations.
You’re paying for their experience.
They already know what ‘usually works best’ in situations like yours. They have huge amounts of experience with the WMS. They know how it works. It’s even better if they wrote it in the first place. An optimal deployment team knows the best way to set your new WMS up for you.
And if you are doing something so unusual that they’ve never seen it before, then they’ve got enough jigsaw pieces on hand (operationally and experientially speaking) that they can look at what you need and then make whatever adjustments required to get you to where you want to go.
I don’t know if you’ve picked up on it, but we (Socius24) have been doing this for a while. Our team have either been involved in developing and deploying Dispatcher WMS from the very start, or they’ve used it operationally, and extensively.
We believe that Socius24 is the most experienced installation partner that you can work with when it comes to Dispatcher WMS. And we’d like to share our experience with you.
So, if you do have any questions, we can probably answer them. And we’re happy to, just ask. You can always get hold of us on info@socius24.com
Speak soon?
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