Radical Change Coming to Warehouse Management Systems and Fulfillment

The traditional supply chain is moving to a highly integrated, digitized, and collaborative extended supply chain.

Manufacturers in life science and elsewhere are deploying technology to improve warehouse operations, inventory management and distribution in their supply chain process. While manufacturing can be diverse, common business issues prevail such as the need to align supply and demand, reduce time to market, and foster and optimize innovation.

The next 24 months will bring radical changes in manufacturers' supply chain strategies and operations, says analyst group IDC.

The way IDC sees it, manufacturing is on the brink of a digital transformation. The industry's processes, business models, and human resource needs are set to be radically changed by a host of still-developing technologies and technology-driven trends.

While many of these technologies, such as e-commerce and 3-D printing, have been around for a while, IDC sees them as converging to create radical changes in the manufacturing supply chain over the next 24 months.

One change that is on the brink of transformation is warehouse management systems and fulfilment services.

You could argue that a warehouse is just a warehouse. But would it be important to know if the warehouse your inventory is stored in utilizes a ​​sophisticated Warehouse Management System (WMS)?

Manufacturers are ​​improving efficiency, accuracy, traceability, management and reducing obsolescence that mitigate risk and​​ improves compliance, through the use of WMS.

Manufacturers will increasingly move away from on premise installations of supply chain execution systems and toward cloud-based WMS and fulfilment—or a hybrid version that combines the two approaches.

Manufacturers of all shapes and sizes and across a variety of industries often struggle with space constraints and distribution difficulties.  Today, manufacturers need sophisticated warehousing and fulfilment services, as well as ​​date and lot control capability to help your company ​​more efficiently and effectively maintain and manage inventory while mitigating risk of out-of-code product.

Additionally, manufacturers need to free up valuable resources, streamline distribution, increase speed to end-users as well as provide a documented process for greater visibility into stock statuses and inventory levels for overall ​​better performance.

Brian Butler is VP Business Development of The Allied Group and author of: Find 'Em Get 'Em Keep 'Em and the recently released In Search Of...Customers!