Given all the increasing demands and operational complexities a manufacturer faces in today’s world, selecting the right supply chain partner who can address your unique requirements while providing the essential execution tools is significant to succeeding and sustaining growth. By leveraging a foundation of best practices to optimize and streamline your operations, you will gain the real-time visibility needed to support your strategic business objectives, make smart business decisions and maximize your technology investment.
Turn your production complexities into long-term competitive advantages by seeking a supply chain partner who delivers the five following best warehouse practices alongside superior manufacturing automation
Real-time inventory control. You need a warehouse management solution (WMS) with functionality extending far beyond raw material picking and finished goods receipts. Without it, keeping all your systems up-to-date and knowing exactly what is taking place on your shop floor becomes an operational nightmare. By integrating mobile barcoding, your raw materials, work in progress (WIP) and finished goods are all tracked in real-time to cut out costly manual processes and erroneous duplicate data entry.
Extensive manufacturing integration. Regardless of how many features and capabilities a WMS has, it must have a seamless integration to your manufacturing operation and other business systems to be effective. By leveraging a proven integration, achieving complete visibility, eliminating lag-time, and enhancing your processes is made simple. Take streamlining your operation one step further by seeking a WMS provider that also has seamless integrations with Vicinity and Horizons Manufacturing.
Cradle to grave lot and serial traceability. Increasing compliance requirements are putting more pressure on you to know exactly what components are used and where your products are at all times. How can you ensure safety of your end consumer if you are unaware of every step within your complex supply chain? The need for cradle to grave traceability from raw material through production will only keep increasing — save yourself the time and frustration by making traceability easier and more manageable.
Hand-held machine time and labor capture. How can you quickly mitigate expensive inefficiencies if you are unable to identify the cause in the first place? By gaining immediate insight into your key performance indicators, you can efficiently track employee productivity and manufacturing equipment efficiency to confidently know the cost of a job successfully completed.
Streamlined, flexible business processes. Having the proficiency to manage volume fluctuation and multiple order types will give you a competitive edge and allow you to acquire new customers more quickly. With best-of-breed WMS functionality, you will arm yourself with the necessary tools for hyper-efficient picking, packaging and shipping to easily respond and pivot to whatever is thrown your way.
Maximizing your investment is the ultimate goal of selecting and implementing a WMS, which is difficult to achieve if the chosen solution lacks the functionality needed to satisfy your strategic business objectives. Leveraging a scalable WMS solution to efficiently manage, optimize and execute your mission-critical manufacturing operation will enable you to evolve and differentiate from the ever-rising competition while streamlining every step within your complex supply chain.
Robert Waugh started his career with HighJump more than 17 years ago. He has worked with more than 400 MS Dynamics GP customers looking to enhance their businesses with a warehouse management system (WMS). He is dedicated to understanding and evaluating customers’ operations, enabling them to best leverage their Dynamics GP investments in tandem with supply chain solutions to streamline their businesses.