WMS benefits: why you need a warehouse management system

Picture the scene. You, a small business owner, wake up one morning and head into the backroom where you keep your stock. All of a sudden, it hits you: you're going to need a better inventory.

Congratulations! Your business is growing. But with that growth comes a challenge. How are you going to keep on top of your stock, orders and fulfilment without tearing your hair out?

Until relatively recently, most businesses made do with pen and paper or a spreadsheet. But today's warehouse management systems are cloud-based. They exist online and can be accessed from any device at any time.

Here at Minster WMS, we provide businesses in a range of industries with two products: CORE and EDGE. CORE is our entry-level product. It does everything you want a WMS to do – and it does it all straight out of the box.

EDGE, meanwhile, is our enterprise offering. It has all of CORE's features, plus the opportunity to customise them with help from our UK development team.

So, why get a warehouse management system? Here are seven reasons worth thinking about.

1. Gain better visibility of stock and operations

A WMS gives you real-time visibility of your stock. With a few clicks of the mouse, you can see the stock levels of a particular SKU or the location of a particular item in transit.

This has one clear advantage: it helps keep mistakes to a minimum. With everything under your nose, you're far less likely to mess up an order.

A detailed overview of your inventory also means you're in a better position to prevent stock-outs and overstocking. It's a kind of precision that works in your favour – no matter how big or small your business.

2. Be more efficient

The end-to-end visibility you get from a WMS doesn't just mean you see more. It also means you're in a better position to streamline and automate your processes.

Software can generate pick lists and paths that are the most convenient and the most efficient. Meanwhile, barcode scanners and headsets can be integrated with your WMS to keep picking errors to an absolute minimum.

With Minster's solutions, for instance, you can achieve 99.98% picking accuracy – a vast improvement on businesses that do without a modern-day WMS.

Packing can be optimised through item tracking and order verification notifications. Meanwhile, the WMS can be integrated with your shipping system for data visibility and immediate access.

Finally, putaway can be improved. Your WMS will tell you the most efficient location to store new stock.

All of this adds up to make a warehouse that runs like clockwork. Once you've made the change, you'll wonder how you ever did without.

3. Cut costs

Are you wasting money on mistakes and mismanaged inventory? You're not alone. If your systems aren't up to scratch, chances are you're losing sight of orders and losing time and money to returns.

With a highly capable WMS, this can be a thing of the past. Voice picking increases accuracy while data visibility reduces human error to almost zero.

4. Keep the customer satisfied

In the Age of eCommerce, customers have high expectations. And we mean high. After all, if you can get next-day delivery with Amazon Prime, why should you wait any longer with a smaller firm?

The bar has been raised for order fulfilment – and your business needs to keep up. A good WMS can massively aid in this endeavour.

It's not just that accuracy is improved, meaning fewer returns and fewer minutes lost to customer service calls. It's also that customers get visibility into their orders.

Many WMS solutions (ours included) feature some kind of ordering portal. This lets customers track their order in real time.

There are many ways to improve customer retention. A well-managed warehouse might not seem as obvious as branding, say, but in our opinion, it's equally important – if not more.

5. Use data to drive decision-making

It's a truism in business that good decisions are driven by data. That applies whether it's a decision about recruitment, day-to-day operations, inventory, branding or, well, anything else.

But where do you get your data from? And isn't it all a time-sink?

With a good WMS, you can generate reports and analytics with just a few clicks of the mouse. By putting your data to work, you get to work smarter – and faster.

6. Scale with ease

It doesn't matter what size your business is: you probably want to grow.

In business, growth is the aim of the game. But it always throws up challenges as well as opportunities. One of these is the difficulty of scaling up.

Let's say you need a bigger warehouse – or a second warehouse, or a third. If you have a manual warehouse management system, you're going to have to spend a lot of time updating your files to ensure everything's in working order. And because it's manual, it's vulnerable to human error.

A WMS makes this problem go away. A cloud-based WMS can be scaled up (or down) with ease. You simply update your requirements and change your capacity accordingly. This means you get to grow without bottlenecks.

7. Optimise fleet management

A WMS doesn't just cover picking, packing and putaway. It gives you the same visibility into and accuracy over your delivery fleet.

This ties into the question of customer expectations. Your goods need to get to the customer on time and few excuses will cut it. Anything less and they're likely to take their custom elsewhere.

With advanced fleet management tools, a WMS can help you make the dream of efficient, affordable delivery a reality.

Are you looking for a SaaS warehouse management system that increases productivity, accuracy and visibility? At Minster WMS, our solutions are built to solve real challenges and fuel real growth. Book a demo today to see how CORE or EDGE could work for you.