6 Reasons a Warehouse Management System is a Wise Investment

Is your warehouse experiencing any of these six bullet points?

If the answer is yes a warehouse management system may be whats needed to take your company to the next level of business.

1. Business Growth A failure to adjust for projected growth can bear devastating consequences which can actually decrease the size of business and, in severe cases, shut down the company as a whole.  Growth is experienced by many successful companies. To accommodate for growth, existing systems should be enhanced with new technologies that can deliver unprecedented efficiencies.
2. Inefficient Manual Processes is Still SOP (Stand Operating Procedure) Manual, paper-intense methods of completing tasks are still a common element in the business processes of some organizations.  These methods are slow, wasteful, and inherently flawed, since human error is rampant and difficult to mitigate. The resulting errors ultimately lead to an increase in costs and a decrease in efficiency.  Manual methods should not be the primary approach for completing a task, but rather, a last resort.
3. Increasing Margin Pressure Declining margins either from increased competition or slower sales are great motivators for change.  When margins are suffering, a reengineering of business processes is needed to tighten and reduce operational costs so that efficiency can be cultivated.
4. Leverage Existing Systems Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are the financial and informational backbones of most companies.  And while they are great for processing and reporting data, they do not facilitate nor improve the actual collection of the raw data.  An automated data collection (or warehouse management) solution does allow for improved data collection.  With additional and more accurate data, the ERP’s ability to process and report information is enhanced.  
5. Government Regulations Certain industries such as food, drug, finance, aerospace, and defense must operate under strict government rules, regulations, and mandates such as Sarbanes-Oxley, ePedigree, the FDA Bioterrorism Act, and more.  Any failure to adhere to these policies can result in severe penalties which can include (but are not limited to) judicial action, criminal convictions, fines, restitution, and imprisonment.
6. Traceability Requirements Based on media and research reports, product recalls are becoming more frequent in industries as diverse as automobiles, electronics, food, and toys. The challenge of conducting a recall is to rapidly identify which products were affected, where the defective products are physically located, and what will be done to the recalled products. Many organizations are not prepared to perform recalls, simply because they lack the ability to track the lifecycle of a product from warehouse to consumer. This oversight can make an already costly recall effort far more burdensome.   

Warehouse Management for Sage 100

Adding a Warehouse Management System to the existing Sage 100 ERP is a very easy process.  With such a system, mobile scanning computers are used in the warehouse to collect data and update the Sage 100 system in an automated and “real time” manner.  Errors are reduced and the delays in updating the Sage 100 system are eliminated.  

Scan for MAS is the warehouse module designed for Sage 100.  It is written on the ProvideX platform (same platform as Sage 100) and includes multi-bin, label printing, and all the standard features of a WMS right in the solution.