Your warehouse isn't just a place to store inventory—it's a central hub for your product, and if it isn't managed properly that could sacrifice time, money, customer retention, and ultimately your business. Here are a lot of common problems you might face in your warehouse that can be resolved by utilizing the best in technology.
Strategize Your Warehouse with an Industrial Tablet
Efficiency and lean processes are common buzz words used in manufacturing and distribution. Every process you can make more efficient means an increase to the bottom line. But too often businesses aren't applying these strategies to how their warehouse is laid out. Having strong knowledge of how your inventory is organized in your warehouse can save man hours over time. x holding an exhaust pipe. Using a rugged industrial tablet coupled with RFID technology can allow you to track how workers move through the warehouse. You can scan bin locations as product is moved to the production line or picked for order shipping. When this data is fed to an ERP system, it can quickly help a warehouse manager diagnose which items are used the most or how workers move through the facility to create a more efficient inventory locations. Warehouse layouts can be updated based on the most efficient traffic flows. Creating an efficient inventory workflow will ultimately lead to increased profits.
Ensure Accurate Inventory Counts with a Barcode Scanner
If there's a manual count of six boxes of head gaskets and your inventory system shows seven, it's time to find what's causing the discrepancy. You'll have to pull away several workers, sacrifice time and money, and do a product hunt for one box that might be lost in the myriad of products—or perhaps it doesn't exist. Good luck. Inventory counts are a fact of life, and are extremely labor intensive and subject to a high degree of human error. If you're out of a product, but your inventory management software says its in stock, that creates a customer service nightmare and could even result in losing that business for good. That's where a rugged tablet with a barcode scanner comes into play. As inventory comes in from third part vendors, it can be scanned into your ERP system. Then as materials are moved out to the manufacturing floor or as product is bought and shipped, each individual unit can be scanned, creating highly accurate inventory counts. Over time, this saves time and money and help to provide a better customer experience as well.
Streamline Manual Picking Processes
If your warehouse isn't fully automated—and most aren't—there's the struggle to know where all products in the warehouse are located. Pickers might receive an order list from a customer and be tasked with wandering around the warehouse to find the corresponding products to prepare them for shipping. This can be a time consuming task and can also result in the wrong orders being sent to customers. If a picker is using an industrial tablet, it can provide the location for each item available in a warehouse for each order and the fastest path to each item in an order based on the traffic flow and inventory layout of your warehouse that we discussed above. Each item picked can be scanned by the tablet, achieving two outcomes. First, by scanning the items, order accuracy is guaranteed. Secondly, inventory levels are updated into your ERP system in real time. Both improving the overall customer experience.
Higher Levels of Worker Management
Running a warehouse on paper will eventually lead to errors. This applies to employee time management as well. While most businesses today utilize some sort of software based time clock management system, there are some still using manual punch cards. In either case, using industrial tablets in the warehouse can help streamline this process. While tablets are primarily used to manage other processes, you can also install your time clock software onto them. Instead of employees having to line up at the one or two stationary computers to clock in and out, tablets can be positioned throughout the warehouse, making the process smoother, and keeping more accurate labor records than manual punch cards.
These are only a few challenges that an industrial tablet can help you overcome in a warehouse environment. Helping you identify those challenges and discover ways to overcome those challenges through technology is what we do at Cybernet. See how an industrial tablet can improve your warehouse operations by calling us today or seeing our inventory.