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Tag: Warehouse

Warehouse Software Sage

Our Tips for Warehouse Management

Written by Pimbrook Software on .

 

Warehouse Management can seem so daunting. Not all improvements involve a lot of effort, so start small!

  1. Be Organised

If your warehouse is not organised, incoming products will not go to the appropriate locations.  Pickers will spend needless amounts of hours trying to find products.  It is essential to establish a system that organises your materials in a logical and defined order.

The best organisation keeps the fastest moving materials front and centre in your warehouse.  You can increase your efficiency by grouping products that are normally ordered in groups. Consider how supermarkets stock products — if you are looking for flour, you do not go to the cleaning aisle.

  1. Reorganise when needed

Really this is a follow on from 1 above.  But is just as important.

What works for your warehouse today may not work six months from now. Re-evaluate your inventory and storage methods periodically to make sure that you maintain the right product flow.  This may mean taking a day out every six months to sit down and assess your product flow.  Do it.  It will save time in the end.

For example, a product that took up a whole aisle last month may now be obsolete.  The product next to it may suddenly be in high demand.  Change the space allocated to your materials when supply and demand changes.  Be flexible.

  1. Think Health and Safety

Maintaining a safe environment is very important to maintaining peace of mind.  You have to meet certain requirements, and protecting your employees from injury is a key goal.  Accidents can cost you the skilled labour you need to keep your warehouse operating.

  1. Keep the homefires lit

Often the modern rectangular shaped shelving can hamper light.  And with warehouses getting bigger and bigger, natural light can also be a problem. But a  brighter warehouse provides not only a safer work environment but also improves your employees’ ability to do their job. Brighter lights also encourages more alertness for what needs to be done.  And helps alert employees to spillages, and problems in the warehouse environment.

  1. Use the right software

Warehouse Management Systems enable you to proactively manage your operations, instead of re-actively. 

Real time reports and alerts notify you of potential problems. 

Effective Enterprise wide decisions such as order sourcing, stock allocation, stock order levels/ sourcing, etc. can only be made through real time and accurate view of stock.

 

Contact Pimbrook today for further details on how we can help you with your warehouse management.

 

warehouse solution

Implementation tips for developing Sustainable Warehouse Solutions

Written by Pimbrook Software on .

Developing Warehouse Solutions

Warehouse Solution, whether you operate discrete or process manufacturing, perform distribution services, or stock goods for retail, developing sustainable warehouse solutions is essential for achieving long-term success.

The conscientious decision to focus on what is commonly known as the triple bottom line—economic, environmental, and social dimensions—involved in operation is a comprehensive business philosophy. And with an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system in place, enacting sustainability measures becomes much easier.

What is sustainable warehouse management?

warehouse solution
Essentially, sustainable warehouse management is a system designed to meet the present needs of society without compromising the opportunities and resources available for future generations.

Although it involves the entire scope of the business process, sustainability is closely associated with environmentally sound procedures. Indeed, Global Reporting Initiative’s G4 guidelines cover this aspect, but most recently, they’ve released a linkage document that will assist the compliance of the latest EU directive for the disclosure of non-financial and diversity information.

Warehouse ERP Implementation

Introducing and developing sustainable warehouse solutions is often a challenge, even with an advanced ERP system. Many distributors employ third-party supplier’s (VMI) and logistics (professional carriers) to orchestrate the chain of supply.

However, even these challenges can be reduced with the following implementation tips and techniques. First, divide your sustainability analyses by aspect and type, and then update your core performance indicators within the system with appropriate coding so that the qualitative and quantitative data can be collected and reported properly.

Ignoring the economic performance and market presence aspects, the following list can help you implement the metrics and indicators used to evaluate company sustainability.

Environmental

  • Materials—a percentage of the input usage of recycled materials
  • Energy—energy consumption of the primary source (direct)
  • Water—total usage amount for the facility
  • Emissions, effluents, and wastes—direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions by weight, oxide emissions by type and weight, and amounts of non-recyclable solid waste

Labour Practises (Social)

  • Employment—employee counts and turnover rates by age group, gender, and region
  • Health and Safety—Injury occurrence rates, work-related fatalities, occupation-related disease, lost days, and absenteeism
  • Diversity and Equal Opportunity—Basic salary allocation by gender and employee category. (Also see the recent G4 linkage document for simplified EU compliance.)

Human Rights (Social)

  • Investment and Procurement—total numbers and percentages of agreements that have gone through human rights screening
  • Child Labour—any measures that have been taken to help eliminate child labour
  • Freedom of Association—measures that support the right to exercise freedom of association and collective bargaining, and any identification of these rights at risk.

Society (Social)

  • Community—the nature and scope of any programmes, practises, or initiatives that have a positive impact on the operation of your community, and the effectiveness and outcomes of those endeavours.
  • Corruption—the amount and percentage of business units that have been examined for risks related to corruption
  • Consumer Health and Safety—this will naturally vary depending on the type of products housed in your facility, but basically, any assessments made concerning the improvement or life cycles of the products that could impact consumers.

With an advanced ERP system, many of these indicators are already integrated, and the reporting framework can be easily customised to include new governmental regulations and directives.

Effective ERP implementation for a sustainable warehouse involves collecting the right data and then making informed business decisions based on the performance reports that your ERP system generates.