The benefits of a warehouse inventory system

A warehouse management platform and related warehouse inventory systems or modules are designed to do more than just count your inventory. They can provide a series of high-quality benefits to an organization, its staff, and customers when management knows how to use these tools.

To understand what’s capable of for your bottom line’s growth, you’ve got to know what functionality is available right now, often at a minimal investment. Here are four ways that a company and its people, from leadership to the pickers and packers, all benefit from introducing a warehouse inventory system.

Real-time inventory data

Warehouse inventory systems can show you what you have in stock at any given moment, allowing sales and fulfillment to ensure that you’re always able to meet the orders you have. You also get data on what moves quickly, what sits on shelves for too long, and which items tend to move together.

Visibility, thanks to advanced metrics, can teach you a lot about your business, especially where you might have opportunities to combine products, create new SKUs, or expand inventory counts to meet growing demand.

Reduce overhead

While an inventory system can help you know when to grow with demand, it can also cut overhead costs for many businesses. Improvements via a WMS can help you store product better to reduce pick times, change packing practices to speed things up, or reduce the number of customer service agents you need thanks to orders going out correctly and quickly.

Some companies report that they use less equipment in the warehouse too. This means less wear-and-tear on your tools, fewer maintenance needs, and even fewer replacement costs. Increasing your accuracy and efforts through a warehouse inventory system just might make it cheaper to run your business.

Enhanced productivity and morale

Inventory and order knowledge can make it easy for managers to plan a workforce’s activity. That planning flows down to warehouse employees who can have a better understanding of their job, how they’re evaluated, and what they need to do to feel like they’re using their time wisely.

Real-time data is a boon to productivity because your staff isn’t worried about trying to do an inventory count in the middle of fulfillment or hunting for the last, misplaced product. They know where things are or if there’s an issue, a WMS provides a straightforward way to flag the problem and have it move up to management, reducing the chance that a warehouse issue is counted against their personal performance. It helps them be more efficient.

Introducing a warehouse inventory system can reduce the stress on your team by making their job easier. When tools simplify work, your team has a chance to relax and take a more organized approach to their work, keeping them safer as well. When a warehouse goes from having accidents to minimizing them, morale increases.

Decrease in paperwork and manual tasks

If you work in warehouse management, this probably feels like saving the best for last.

Warehouse inventory systems, whether they’re a separate module or included in a broader WMS, eliminate a wide range of manual tasks, and that typically comes with a significant reduction in paperwork. Inventory counts are automated and displayed on a dashboard, as are tracking employee metrics. Orders become digital, and so do audits.

Not only does a WMS eliminate the burden that extensive paperwork can cause, but you may even see greater accuracy thanks to automation and less human error. It’s something you really can’t beat.