Warehouse Woes? No More!
(A Done and Done Insights piece with revisiting Supply Chain Junction's Founder Mr. Michael Badwi piece)
Secondary Research: An experience | Time to Read: 2.3 mins
Mr. Michael Badwi, the Founder and Chief Business Officer of Supply Chain Junction has a penchant for supply chain warehousing and penning pieces and snippets together for the practitioners, students, academicians and even those not from the community. With a geographic presence across the Middle East and African regions; has had a taste of the most adverse climatic as well as political and environmental conditions across his 20 years' professional journey-pertaining to warehouses; storage of goods and the systems required to ensure productivity. Done And Done brings to the forefront one of his insights on the need for warehouse ERP systems while re-enforcing method to madness in the world of supply chain. This piece re-addresses the need for metrics to assure and ensure collective growth.
To begin with, warehouses are broadly categorised as places where one would store material (whether raw, WIP or finished goods; some are even stored in-transit to and fro) the storage aspect accounts to constraints of costs that are burdened in terms of looking for a storage location, the nature of requirement and moreover the duration of storage of goods that need to be kept in storage. At inception design, layout and capacity are taken care of only to realise that during peak surges additional material and additional requirements are to be met. In such a situation to maintain balance the warehouse manager considers his job a Herculean task with woes from the management to reduce inventory and also allocate areas for excess material. The opposite is also true when there is little to no demand of certain products and an under-utilisation of the space is anticipated. So, with all this mayhem around; there is a need for Warehouse management at a planning and strategic level as well as at a granular level. You would wonder how to go ahead with it? S&OP? Or just aggregated averaged methods? Well they may work out for a short period of time and are not completely causal in nature.
Thus, each aspect of the warehouse function's action can be and should be quantified. What flows into the warehouse, what stays in the warehouse, what moves within the warehouse and how, where and when it moves out of the system can all be measured using metrics. Thus, ERP WMS ensure to replicate the scenario and optimise it. Metrics become a foundation stone when data is collated, churned, processed and even stored so a s to call it a data warehouse rather than a physical warehouse. These metrics inform the decision-maker when to input more or less and where to input more or less material in and out of the warehouse. This while sounds complex follows a rhythmic pattern and hence the physical movements are mapped into ERP systems as well. Simple metrics include the actual count of materials (smaller quantities such as screws etc.-in batches), the accuracy check of the material flow in, internal usage and outflow. With mass scales and speed these counts and flows require more than a human to intervene-with ERP systems that include barcodes and algorithms that are sophisticated to carry out the computational aspects and throw a result best suited for the particular flow of goods; key base metrics are considered necessary. An example of such metrics, how to quantify them and their suitability are elaborated by Mr. Michael's article on what to measure in warehouses.
Done and Done looks at constraints as puzzles to be solved, and the best method comes from collective input; mathematics and more so a goal. Benchmarking warehouses at its inception to be a model warehouse is an easier task as compared to an ongoing warehouse. The activities are running and to transition from method of working requires more than an intervention of posting methods, 5S rules and Six Sigma techniques. One fundamentally being the ability to decide centralisation of certain tasks, and de-centralisation of others-thus sharing ownership of activities while also being able to monitor them. Having checks at each movement of material flow (either via a barcode) or via any other mode of robotic pickers-striving towards perfection and an ideal supply chain design includes how the warehouse is viewed in silo as well as a part of the entire supply chain puzzle as a piece. The inputs carefully discuss the nuances and type of metrics and can be referred in the long run.
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