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Boost Your Warehouse Inventory Accuracy and Productivity with Total Warehouse Logistics

Total Warehouse Logistics (TWL) improves your distribution warehouse’s operational efficiency, general team productivity, and the overall profitability of your business.

Is this a big claim to start this article with? Yes. But it’s true.

And you’re about to see how.

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The Desire

A distribution company should deliver high quality, and a repeatable excellent customer service experience.

Delivering an excellent customer experience is equally as important as identifying efficient ways to reduce costs wherever possible.

Being able to do BOTH will keep costs low, customers satisfied, and increase your business’s profits.

Fortunately, warehouse automation through TWL can help you achieve both. We’ll explore this further and provide you with ideas on how your distribution company can take advantage of the many benefits TWL affords.

The Problem of Paper-Based Warehouses

3 major complaints people running a paper-based warehouse have include:

1.   Low Confidence in Inventory Accuracy

Inaccurate bin count at a warehouse is a big headache. Unfortunately, it happens a lot.

If you aren’t certain of the order quantity in your bin locations, you will leave your pickers stranded, confused, and wasting useful time in search of what may not be there.

2.   No Visibility Into Transactional Activity

If a customer calls to find out the state of their order – maybe it’s hung up for some reason or they just want to know the status – a paper-based warehouse can’t provide this answer without disrupting the general operations of the warehouse.

3.   Valuable Time is Lost to Low-Value Tasks and Error Correction.

Valuable time is lost by employees trying to locate items. Plus, unavoidable human errors do happen occasionally: Selecting the wrong product or quantity or inaccurate recording of an order’s quantity are a few errors that can occur.

TWL solves all of this by tracking automatically.

The Solution: TWL

Automating your warehouse can afford your distribution company significant operational benefits.

Through barcoding, you’re able to track the movement of EVERYTHING: items, locations, cartons, totes, palettes, and even your employees.

First, you don’t have to do the annual physical count anymore because a cyclical count is created automatically every day and keeps everything up to date.

Second, all the information employees need to do their job will be delivered via handheld devices such as Androids or iPhones, rugged scanners, and tablets. This automation eliminates the many manual processes they would otherwise have to do as part of their job roles.

The warehouse manager also maintains a sophisticated level of tracking on the everyday happenings of the distribution warehouse, and therefore can easily set goals and monitor how they’re being met.

Most importantly, all the problems of a paper-based warehouse are solved efficiently and simultaneously. Here’s how:

1.   Inventory Accuracy

Through barcoding, you’re able to track all inventory movements. You can tell if an order has been picked, who picked it, and how and when it will be shipped.

This gives you ultimate control over what happens in your warehouse. And allows you to focus on things that need attention while the system handles the rest.

2.   Transactional Visibility

Accurate inventory tracking allows you to serve your customers better. Employee scans provide accurate data on order activity and status.

So when they call, you can immediately let them know the state of their order without dropping the phone or leaving your office.

3.   Travel Time and Errors are Reduced to the Barest Minimum

The information employees need is in the palm of their hands. This means they know the exact location of an order and move directly to retrieve it, reducing travel time. Errors are also reduced because the TWL can track item locations and inform you if there’s a discrepancy anywhere.

This improves the overall productivity of warehouse operations.

With TWL, your employees will perform their daily tasks easier and faster, thus boosting productivity and operational efficiency. The trickle-down effect? Better customer service, lower labor costs, and error elimination which has the potential to save distributors hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Or as we like to say: it increases your profitability!

TWL is powered by Infor’s CloudSuite Distribution. And as a partner, NSA can provide and implement effective Total Warehouse Logistics into your distribution business.

For nearly 40 years, NSA has assisted wholesale distributors to evolve their business with industry-specific functionality. If you’d like our help in automating your warehouse to realize increased productivity and profitability, visit https://nsacom.com/get-in-touch/.

We look forward to hearing from you soon!

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