The warehouse is usually busy due to the number of operations happening simultaneously. A good warehouse manager or operator must streamline all these activities for improved efficiency, accuracy and operation speeds. This article will cover warehouse order management optimization and its benefits. However, let us define a few terms to help you understand our main topic of discussion.
What is Warehouse Order Management?
Warehouse order management refers to receiving, tracking and fulfilling warehouse orders issued by customers. It, therefore, begins right from the placement of the order and ends when the product is finally delivered to the customer.
This entire process should be streamlined, especially when running a busy warehouse, to avoid getting overwhelmed by the number of incoming orders. Remember, customers expect you to deliver regardless of your warehouse’s inadequacies.
Order management is normally done through an order management system, which offers a central place for viewing and managing all your customer orders.
Features to Optimize
You should target certain features when optimizing your warehouse order management process as they play an important role in helping you make timely deliveries and keeping the customer fulfilled. These include payment processing, delivery, inventory management and order tracking.
Payment Processing
Payment processing is an important feature in warehouse order management as it commences the process of order fulfillment. It involves the receiving, confirmation and processing of payments. It should be handled by online or third-party software instead of a physical cashier to reduce human error and save on costs.
Every warehouse should have a proper order management system to avoid fraud cases. These systems should have a payment confirmation process to ensure that the business does not authorize or fulfill bad orders.
Inventory Management
Inventory management should also be optimized as it aims to update the existing number of inventories. It tracks the inventory levels in the organization at any particular time to ensure that the warehouse maintains accurate figures, which is important for order fulfillment. In the context of inventory management, it’s crucial to have an organized and efficient system for storing and accessing goods. This is where the right shelving solutions come into play. Opting for used shelving can be a cost-effective way to enhance your warehouse’s storage capacity and organization. By ensuring that your inventory is stored on sturdy, reliable shelving, you can improve order accuracy and speed up the fulfillment process.
Every warehouse should have a way of confirming that it can deliver the right number of products requested when an order is placed. The available numbers should then be recorded on external and internal sites to prevent the potential sale of unavailable items. Inventory management, therefore, plays an important role in avoiding cases of overstocking or backorders.
Order Tracking
As we mentioned, warehouse order management begins with the placement of the order and ends at its delivery. Order tracking is also equally important as it helps deliver constant updates and in time estimations. For those who use third-party service and rely on last-mile delivery, order accuracy can be fulfilled by using the service to track the item.
You must come up with a solution that helps keep track of all your drivers and processes.
Delivery
Even though product delivery comes in the end, it should not be overlooked. It is normally initiated by confirming the payment information and basically involves receiving, organizing, authorizing and finally ensuring that the product reaches the customer.
You should optimize this process to give the team an easy time picking, packaging and sending the right order to the right recipient.
Tips to Optimize Your Warehouse Management Process
It would be best to consider a few things when optimizing your warehouse order management process, or it may fail to take off. Take note of the following:
Maintain Clean Data
You cannot achieve great results with warehouse order management optimization if you do not keep clean data. Customers love honesty and visibility whenever they make orders, meaning that you should keep your promise on the delivery date and offer regular updates on the order.
Most warehouses have a transportation management system to set the delivery date, but it can only work well with accurate data on your logistics processes. The number of systems in the warehouse poses a great risk as they can fragment data, making changes may not reflect easily. You should invest in quality centralized, integrated databases linking back to the entire software suite.
Keep Your Processes Standardized
It would help if you built standardized workflows at the beginning of process optimization to prevent unnecessary confusion and challenges later. This is crucial since most warehouses create processes as they grow, doing different things for customers, later becoming a problem. You can use any hyper-automation solution to perform business process analysis and avoid such issues in the future.
Involve Customers in the Order Management Process
You need to make the order management process more visible to customers through reporting. This can be achieved via order updates or passing any information worthy to them, including bad news such as delivery delays or shipment issues.
Benefits/Importance of Warehouse Order Management Optimization
Warehouse order management optimization comes with many advantages that you should enjoy when done right. These include:
Builds better Customer Relations
Warehouse order management optimization ensures that the order fulfillment process moves smoothly and goods reach the customers in good time, which boosts relations and keeps them coming back.
Improved Warehouse Efficiency
Optimization ensures that the warehouse order management process moves on smoothly as it eliminates certain human errors, making the warehouse more efficient. It streamlines operations, preparing the warehouse to respond to several different orders.
Reduces Waste
Warehouse order management optimization also ensures that only the right quantity of goods is delivered to the recipient, thus reducing instances of waste resulting from losses. It also focuses on the inventory management system, which deals with the number of available products and checks for those likely to go to waste. Lastly, warehouse order management optimization deals with the payment process, ensuring that the business does not fulfill or authorize bad orders.
Reduces Human Errors
Some human errors are costly and may lead to losses. Warehouse management optimization steps to reduce these errors by encouraging the use of technology and thus makes most processes flawless.
Conclusion
Warehouse order management optimization is key for better order fulfillment. Therefore, warehouses should take the right steps to ensure that they streamline their operations in relation to order management.
