"What to Expect from Your WMS"

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"CDC Supply Chain's extended warehouse management solution enables companies to implement supply chain best practices for physical handling of goods in supply chain nodes, such as finished goods warehouses, central warehouses, distribution centers, cross-dock and flow-through centers, return centers, and local outlets."
Source: CDC Software

Resources Related to What to Expect from Your WMS:

• Warehouse Management System (WMS) (Wikipedia)

What to Expect from Your WMS

Executive Summary

For most markets companies are facing tougher competition and increasing requirements on service levels and cost control, but at the same time balance growth or right-sizing with shorter cycles of phase-in/ phase-out of product assortments. This means you need to take advantage of information technology to support change, secure data and process quality and improve productivity and performance.

This whitepaper explores how a Warehouse Management System (WMS) can provide different roles in your organization with a set of tools to support their role, and to build Speed, Control and Flexibility into your warehouse operation. It also outlines what you should look for in a WMS to help you create competitive advantages and increased profitability.

Introduction

Warehouse management is often the core of Supply Chain Execution (SCE) solutions, aiming at helping companies to implement supply chain best practices for physical handling of goods in finished goods warehouses, central warehouses, distribution centers, cross-dock centers, return centers, and local outlets.

A good Warehouse Management System (WMS) supports different roles in performing their tasks better. WMS enables companies to optimize warehouse operations and increase utilization of warehouse space, reduce obsolete products, improve delivery reliability and increases warehouse turnover. It is also instrumental that the warehouse operation integrates with the surrounding planning, ordering and transportation processes to sup-port full control of the logistics operation, whether in manufacturing, transportation, warehousing, wholesale or retail. When the node becomes a bridge in the supply chain, the WMS can truly help boost individual and over-all performance.

Key User Benefits

Regardless of whether you are a warehouse manager or worker, a WMS has a lot to offer in helping you fulfill your daily responsibilities and tasks. Let's look at what a WMS solution can do for you in any of these roles:

• C-level supply chain executive
• Warehouse/Site manager
• Area/Shift manager
• Warehouse worker
• Warehouse analyst
• IT manager
• Client account manager

C-level supply chain executive

For C-level executives, VP of logistics, operations or supply chain, WMS solutions help you not only to meet aggressive benchmarks for your organization's productivity and quality, but also to support initiatives and sup-ply chain models for fast inventory rotation, trusted and safe process control and customer satisfaction.

You also need to secure that all aspects of the operation can be monitored and measured across sites, relationships (vendors, customers) and products.

• Growing or restructuring your business
  Are you expanding or acquiring new businesses to gain market share? Do you plan to move into new markets or regions? To support growth, you need your facilities to cope with increased volumes and flexible sales and distribution channels; preferably without building new sites. You need a WMS that can scale to support your strategies, and to seamlessly fit into your logistics network design and distribution models.
• Increasing customer service
  Shipping the right products, services and quality at the right time and cost is a simple recipe. But delivering the perfect order calls for process control, efficient deployment of resources and responsiveness in the warehouse operation. With the proper WMS solution, objectives for customer satisfaction along with inventory, picking and shipping accuracy can, and should, be set high. As for transaction control and traceability, it needs to be built-in.
• Creating a lean supply chain
  Increasing inventory turnover to drive out cost and increase customer responsiveness is your daily challenge. Do you need to align supply chain processes with your manufacturing operation? Or tie in external suppliers more effectively and turn your warehouse operations into high-performing flow-through centers? Implemented correctly, the right WMS can certainly help you here with ability to integrate information flows and leverage automated data collection standards and technologies.
• Protecting your investment
  Adding facilities? Introducing transit shipments and cross-docking? Planning for automation or other new technologies? You want a solution that is flexible to adapt to your priorities and business needs and still be 100 % reliable. Business processes need to be supported with a minimum of code changes using configurable workflows, business rules and integration models.
• Control
  Integrated with the WMS you should look for integrated performance management components that provides dashboards and reports that help you identify trends and warehouse performance across sites and over time, with well defined KPIs and (if you want to) drill-down into granular data to analyze reasons for good or bad performance.

Pick up the challenge and start thinking of how you can use WMS functionality and configurability to support your best practices and exceed your competitors in flawless supply chain execution.

Warehouse/Site Manager

As the site or warehouse manager, you want to control all aspects of your operation to make sure you are tuning the processes correctly to meet cost and service objectives

You want to align your resources to make your warehouse operation both a reliable and high-performing production engine, as well as a responsive vehicle for executing changes in service requirements. Also, you need to rest assured that the WMS solution will allow you to adopt new technology for material handling and automatic identification where appropriate. You are constantly challenged to reduced cost and increase service levels.

• High throughput in a dynamic environment
  It is easy to push big volumes in a batch environment where you know what orders you need to receive, pick and ship. But reality is different. You might need to work with late order stop times and same day shipping. You might have a production line that pushes products into the warehouse and for immediate allocation to customer orders. The right WMS can deal with less than 24 hour cycle times from order through to delivery at customers' site, and help you manage this planning nightmare.
• Process quality
  A true real-time WMS solution imposes the level of transaction control and quality checks that you want, helping your staff avoid mistakes. It needs to be designed for a paperless environment and system-directed task management.
• Warehouse efficiency and utilization
  For optimal performance, you need to look at doing things right by setting up correct workflows and routines. But no less important is doing the right things and look dynamically at order priorities, departure dead-lines, outstanding tasks, and inventory status to support and automate this decision making. This can be enabled by configuring warehouse workflows that directs process execution based on product, customer and resource constraints.
• Labor efficiency
  Resource optimization must be built-in as the core philosophy in the solution, always looking at the best way to execute across all existing tasks, given the available locations, equipment and staff. But you also want answers on questions like: Do I have the right staffing? Is the workforce performing below or above the target? Why is one team performing better than another? Can this WMS solution provide the right data to support us?
• Inventory productivity
  Are the products in the right location? How quickly are we turning inventory for different products? Do we spend much time driving with empty forks? Inventory management might not be your responsibility, but you surely want to be able to see how to organize the operation to minimize travel time and increase space utilization.
• Warehouse technology
  Thinking of voice-directed picking? Investing in a new conveyer system? Are customers requiring RFID-tagging? The solution needs to support integration to most kinds of material handling equipment and RF devices, including voice recognition.
• Stability
  If you are into high transaction volume processing for extremely demanding customers, the WMS solution must not let you down. It needs to be designed for 24 by 7 operations to just run, run, run.
• Warehouse monitoring and control
  As warehouse manager you should be working with preventive exception management and not fire-fighting. The WMS should provide you with monitoring dashboards for the real-time view on workload, queues and exceptions and with reports and analysis tools for seeking root causes and benchmarking against other sites.

As a Warehouse Manager, can you say that it is good enough with only a few of these properties covered? No, guess not. So you should look for a solution that gives you all of the above.

Shift/Area Manager

Being responsible for a staff of warehouse workers - perhaps at the receiving docks, running the night shift or the team picking the fresh goods - you want the right tools for your team to reach sustainable performance, and for yourself access to information that makes it possible to set individual goals and monitor team workload and throughput.

You need decision support to make necessary adjustments before a potential bottleneck becomes a real problem.

• Getting it done
  As stated earlier, dealing with high volume should be a core competence of the WMS. The basic philosophy must be to pull products out of the warehouse based on inventory strategies, customer priori-ties and shipping schedules, and to avoid manual waving (or use it only when you need that).
• Ensure process quality
  Transactions in the WMS need to be designed to help your team avoid mistakes. All scans are to be validated in real-time. For consistent customer service, the solution should support earliest and latest times for starting and finishing tasks to help you control that all activities meet their deadlines.
• Labor efficiency and resource utilization
  An important part of how you are measured is probably performance relative to standards, and how well you assign your team to perform productive work. Make sure the WMS helps you automate task priori-ties and assignments for the key processes
• Workload and queue monitoring
  Throughput relies not only on data processing, but on the right staff and equipment being available at the right time and getting the right priorities to help you plan the workload in a dynamic environment. The WMS can provide the aids to help you prioritize tasks, change staff work zone allocations, and follow progress.
• Employee performance analysis
  All tasks are recorded with planned and actual duration, and are the basis for calculating KPIs that help you not only to analyze task durations, but also monitor employee performance in terms of absolute volumes handled and time spent versus standard.

The thinking is you should spend less time chasing people, and spend more energy on developing and improving working procedures.

Warehouse Worker

What do you need to perform at your best? First, you want the IT solution to support and not restrict you when executing your tasks. You want quick response times and access to the right information.

If you are a high-performing picker, you want precise instructions and immediate response. If you work all across the warehouse as a lift truck driver, you want to be able to trust the system to give you the right tasks and priorities, but perhaps also have the freedom to override (i.e. to pick up an alternative pallet from a floor location when the one you were told to get is 'in the middle'). And you certainly want to get your individual feedback on how you perform to make sure you are correctly paid.

• Ease of use
  All screens, whether PC workbenches or streamlined UIs for handhelds, should be designed to be easy to learn, giving you access to the right information.
• No mistakes
  The WMS should guide you to perform the appropriate steps in each process, and to collect the required data for complete transactions. You will increase your accuracy and be able to focus on productive work.
• Individual profiles
  Where can I work? What can I do? How skilled am I? All these questions are part of setting up your pro-file in the system. This means you will get tasks assigned accordingly. If you are a beginner, you might just be allowed to pick one order at a time. If you are experienced, you may perform cluster picking across four-five orders in the same pick walk.
• Getting the system out on the floor
  The operation usually settles for transaction control using one standard technology, like case picking with voice terminals and full pallet picking via lift truck RF terminals and scanners. But methods and equipment can also be mixed and matched with user needs, with the underlying idea to make functionality available where needed. If you need to look up a purchase order in the receiving process, you should be able to do so using your handheld. If you need a pick location to be replenished, trigger it via your voice terminal.
• Individual performance feedback
  You don't want to be measured against incorrect data. The WMS can provide you with access to your individual performance data so you can validate that your performance is reflected accurately in the sys-tem of records.

If we agree that the above is important then you can go out and trust the system - it will help you perform better!

Warehouse Analyst

You have the task of making the system play according to the overall supply chain and production strategies. Configuration of the WMS is your home ground, making sure that the system is set to support the warehouse operation to run with minimum waste of resource time and warehouse space, and without queues and short-ages.

To predict and plan what impact new products, layout changes and production methods will have is important, but also to look for fine-tuning of standard times and workflows.

• Flexible configuration
  You need a broad range of options available to adapt workflows to product properties, warehouse locations and equipment used. And you want to put all warehouses in the same system to take advantage of shared master data and still treat each facility as unique in terms of layout, workflows, resources and integrations.
• Verify and tune settings
  The WMS should include a multitude of triggering events and process monitors to make sure that the right tasks are prioritized and dispatched to the right user and equipment. But you also need to be able to follow what happens in real-time monitoring screens and record comparative data about when tasks are actually started and finished versus when they were planned to be started or finished
• Analyze tasks and standard times
  Every activity in the WMS should be logged with start and finish time stamps, and include equipment, product, order, user and other dimensions. These allow for analysis of trends, expected durations versus actual times, jobs started or ended early/late etc.

In all, a good WMS will provide you with the flexibility to adapt to local conditions, and help you verify that the setup is optimal.

IT Manager

Managing a WMS from an IT perspective is a tough task. You are challenged with demands for more up-time, increasing transaction volumes, wireless networks and more peripherals.

Not to mention integration to different systems and equipment. When the WMS stops, the operation stops. So you must deliver capacity, reliability and stability. Also when the operation changes equipment, introduces new functionality or opens a new site. What can a strong WMS do for you?

• 24/7
  Of course, it needs to be designed for all-day operations. No shutting down for back-up or batch jobs.
• Scalability
  If you are in a smaller environment you might prefer running a standard Windows server, if you operate a bigger data center balancing the load across a heap of UNIX processors. And it is your choice whether to run all sites in one system, or use a distributed model with e g one server per DC.
• Flexible deployment
  The WMS provider should allow choices for you to deploy the system using your own IT organization and your preferred hardware. Or you may select to run the application as a service with guaranteed availability.
• Quick implementation
  Make sure the WMS that can be rolled out quickly across your network of sites and servers, with tools to support upgrades and data conversion to minimize downtime.
• Integration
  Web services API, flat files or EDI? The system should be open to let you choose the mechanisms you want to use, and fit with you integration strategy like in a service-oriented architecture. The solution must be available. You should not be wakening up by calls from the night shift. Look for references to check that the provider guarantees a very stable and reliable solution.

Client Account Managers

As a manager of a 3PL client you need access to information that measures the overall performance of the operation, and allows you to (1) create the right reports and KPIs regarding produced services to present to the client, and (2) analyze the effort it takes to produce the requested services (in order to cost and price based on activity drivers).

• Throughput volumes
  By client, product, client's customers and vendors provide you with handled volumes in your preferred unit of measure (orders, lines, pallets, cases, weight, volume, etc).
• Storage volumes
  Actual inventory levels, space utilization and turns are calculated and readily available for your preferred time intervals.
• Process quality
  On-time, accuracy and completeness makes up perfect receiving and perfect shipping measurements. Prove that you live up to the contract, and prove that bad quality in means bad quality out (or more cost). In all, a solid model for activity based costing makes you equipped to manage your accounts and continue to develop the business with your clients.

Key Process Benefits

For reference, below are some key process features to look for when judging how well a WMS offering can help you achieve streamlined workflows, configurability to fit different layouts and industries, and compliance with standard concepts like Serialized Shipping Container Code (SSCC) license plates and Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) bar codes.

Inbound Processes

• Receiving
  • Directed workflow
  • Real-time validation and updates
  • Exception handling
• Quality control
  • Random checks
  • Vendor scorecards
  • Hold policies
• Put-away
  • Directed
  • Optimizing space utilization
• Flow-through
  • Planned cross-docking
  • Opportunistic cross-docking
  • Replenishment round

Outbound processes

• Picking & packing
  • Wave planning for automatic or manual release
  • Streamlined execution
  • Support alternative picking techniques (paper, RF, voice, automated)
  • Support alternative picking strategies (fixed or floating locations with dynamic slotting, pre-picking, kit picking, multiple pickers per order, multiple orders per picker etc)
  • Merge/Consolidate as part of the process
  • Random checks (of picking accuracy)
  • Real-time monitoring
• Staging and shipping
  • Departure scheduling
  • Dock allocation
  • Load planning (with visibility into all planned picks and cross-dock units)
  • Late changes
  • Carrier compliance

Supporting Processes

• Task management
  • Optimized movement tasks
  • Task interleaving
  • Dynamic task priorities
  • Workload and queue monitoring
• Inventory control
  • License plates
  • Inventory balances (item loads, load carriers, items)
  • Inventory audits
  • Holds
• Flexible warehouse configuration
  • Warehouses
  • Areas
  • Zones
  • Locations
  • Travel paths
  • Product characteristics
  • Clients
• Integration
  • Web services
  • Host integration
  • Equipment integration
  • Transportation integration

Summary

A WMS helps companies increase profitability, effectiveness and efficiency by faster and timelier movement of products through the supply chain with minimum handling of goods and maximum throughput of orders. This - along with highly efficient labor deployment, optimized space utilization and cost effective receiving and picking processes - results in reduced operating costs.

A good WMS implemented in the right way, is a guarantee for high operational reliability, scalability and flexibility, supporting:

• Superior picking and shipping control for excellent customer service.
• Usage of detailed advance shipping notice (ASN) message structures and handling of goods based on ASN and/or order information.
• Automatic identification of goods handled in the supply chain node.
• Resource optimization across space, equipment and staff.
• 100% mobility in warehouse operations via usage of voice recognition technology and radio frequency equipment for receiving, movement, picking and shipping activities.
• Flow-through pool point operations with cross-docking of transit goods.

Acronyms Used

• ASN — Advanced Shipping Notice
• DC — Distribution Center
• EDI — Electronic Data Interchange
• IT — Information Technology
• KPI — Key Performance Indicator
• PC — Personal Computer
• RRF — Radio Frequency
• RFID — Radio Frequency IDentification
• 3PL — Third Party Logistics
• UI — User Interface
• WMS — Warehouse Management System

About CDC Supply Chain

CCDC Supply Chain - formerly Catalyst International and Industri-Matematik International Corp. (IMI) is the Supply Chain management product division of CDC Software and provides specialist supply chain solutions to our customers for over 40 years. CDC Software now serves more than 6.000 customers in over 50 countries. CDC Supply Chain offers a broad range of integrated, open standards-based solutions that service key areas of complex supply chains and distribution networks. The solutions can operate as standalone modules or can seamlessly integrate into an enterprise's existing applications. Key functionality in the CDC Supply Chain Suite includes order & inventory management, demand & replenishment planning, warehouse management, transportation management, dynamic route planning, slotting, labor management, cross dock planning and yard management.

Some of the world's leading companies use CDC Supply Chain including: Ahlsell, Ahold/Albert Heijn, Aldo Shoes, Astra Zeneca, Boeing/Aviall, Canadian Tire, Celesio/NMD, The Container Store, Dixons Group, Fred´s Inc, General Motors, Homebase, Kramp Group, ICA Norway, Isaberg Rapid, Legrand Group, Motorola/Symbol, NorgesGruppen, Pan Nordic Logistics, PepsiCo International, SABIC (GE Plastics), Schenker Logistics and Tuko Logistics. For more information, please visit http://www.cdcsupplychain.com/.