Warehouse management helps organise, manage and maintain all the processes that take place within a warehouse. All that enables a smooth and efficient warehouse operation. Despite the automation of warehouse management, there can be mistakes and challenges in their process. These challenges may affect the speed, efficiency and productivity of the warehouse’s entire chain operation. Mostly, these errors appear after the commencement or even after the completion of the process. Sometimes, it could be too late to rectify these warehouse management errors. So, as a business owner, it pays to visualise the challenges regarding warehouse management in advance. So that you can predict them beforehand and stop the damage before it starts. All that will likely help you run your warehouse operations smoothly. In this article, we will explain about the challenges that may occur in warehouse management.
What is Warehouse Management?
Warehouse management is the process of carefully handling the materials’ storage, receipt, movement inside the warehouse, and their delivery service to customers. In addition, warehouse management also ensures material handling, order fulfilment and inventory control.
Furthermore, warehouse management plays a critical role in a smooth supply chain management process. So, with an efficient product management, businesses can deliver to their customers without making any mistakes. Otherwise, improper warehousing can often lead to many mistakes and challenges. It ensures a smooth flow of products from the manufacturing unit to the warehouse before delivering the same to the end users. Your warehouse management can be effective if you secure the handling of materials as well as track and control the storage of products and deliver them to end users smoothly. Additionally, warehouse management includes tracking, measuring and maintaining optimum inventory levels, besides ensuring lower inventory costs.
What are the Challenges Faced in Warehouse Management?
There are lots of challenges that may occur in warehouse management if you cannot handle them properly. The following are some of them that often raise concerns for businesses.
Inaccurate Inventory Operations
One of the major issues facing warehouses might be inaccurate inventory management. It creates picking issues because employees may go to a place where the product is not available. Something similar may occur if goods are kept in an area that is already occupied.
The manual process of updating inventory data can cause inaccurate data information, labour-intensive physical inspections and error correction.
One of the most significant warehousing challenges is the amount of time and money wasted on carrying out these less-than-optimal procedures.
Inefficient Space Utilisation
The warehouse manager may face difficulties managing inventory if the warehouse is not set up properly. Warehouse spaces are not being utilised efficiently if your warehouse space capacity is utilised half.
Layout optimisation is the ideal solution to warehouse problems since it allows warehouses to store as many products as possible by making better use of their floor and vertical space.
Errors in warehouse setup might also result in time lost searching for frequently moved items. It directly affects profitability because a product picker can only complete a smaller number of orders in a given amount of time spent looking for a product.
Improper Labour Management
Labour expenses can make up as much as 65 percent of the whole warehouse budget. Workers are an essential component of the warehouse, and their efficient management can raise the overall output of various warehouse operations.
The availability of costly equipment and a workforce that ranges from associates to managers can make managing a huge labour force chaotic and complex, creating significant challenges for warehouse managers.
To make the most out of the labour, warehouse managers need to make crucial decisions. They need to identify places where automated technology can help cut labour costs and improve the effectiveness of the order fulfilment process.
Adapting to Seasonal Demands
One of the main challenges with warehousing is that it cannot control changing customers demands. Variations in customer demand are caused by several reasons, including economic cycles, trends in products, and seasonal changes.
Regarding product fulfilment, warehouses have significant hurdles due to the fluctuations in customers’ demand cycle. During certain months, demand may be more than inventory levels, while in other months, sales may decline due to low demand.
A balance between supply and demand is critical to a successful fulfilment process. The warehouse and other elements of the supply chain, particularly procurement and transportation, shouldn’t be separated anyway.
Flawed Management
With the development of technology, customers may now order goods from a variety of sources. Managing customer orders coming from several sources can be a laborious task and a full-blown problem for a warehouse with an omnichannel sales channel.
Orders may be placed via offline sales channels, e-commerce platforms, business websites, and more. Order management and fulfilment mistakes might arise from the use of Excel sheets and pen and paper methods.
This may result in problems allocating capacity, sending pickers to retrieve the wrong orders, and giving consumers what they didn’t order. An order management system is essential for solving these kinds of warehouse management issues.
Conclusion
Nowadays warehouse management demands digitalisation because it needs to run smoothly to fulfil the demands of customers. While handling warehouse management is critical, making sure the eventual delivery goes right too! You can always collaborate with handover (handover Karo, Khush Raho) for on-time delivery services in Ghaziabad, Noida, Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune and several other cities across India.
