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Warehouse Management System (WMS) in an ERP for Enterprise
Today, let us discuss the common inventory/ warehouse management system (WMS) concerns or requirements for most of our enterprise customers. Besides the usual Finance, Sales and Purchases requirements, WMS is one of the concerns that was often cited by customers as one of their reasons for looking for a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.

So, what exactly are their concerns? Below are the common ones that we often encountered:
  1. Does your system support barcode? Are you able to generate your own barcode?
  2. I want to use barcode so that my warehouse staffs do not need to key in the items manually. Do you support mobile scanning of barcode?
  3. Does your system have expiry date? Do you have “Lot Number”?
  4. I have more than one warehouses. How can I do stock take?
  5. How do I ensure that my warehouse pick the right items and right quantity? We always deliver the wrong items to our customers.


 
 
When you have a new Sales Order (SO), your staff will generate a picking list that will be sent to your warehouse to do picking.
 

The main reason for using an ERP system is to help to your enterprise to better manage the business processes as well as to help your staffs to work more efficiently and to increase their productivity. However, not all systems are the same and hence, many enterprises will start to develop these concerns over the years as they went through the pain of choosing the wrong system.

In general, whenever you have incoming raw materials or stocks, you will perform Good Receipt Note (GRN) and then put it away into your warehouse. When you have a new Sales Order (SO), your staff will generate a picking list that will be sent to your warehouse to do picking. Upon completion of picking and packing, your delivery man will pick up the packed items with the Delivery Order (DO) and Sales Invoice (SI) and go out for delivery.

If the process involves manufacturing, then the manufacturing staff will pick up the raw materials from the warehouse based on his/her Production Order, to complete the production. After production, it will be put away into the warehouse as finished goods.

At this stage, you probably will realise that there are several triggering points where your inventory level will go up and down:
  1. Upon GRN -> Stock level goes up
  2. Upon DO or SI -> Stock level goes down
  3. Upon completion of production -> Raw material level goes down and finished goods level go up
 
Warehouse
 
Firstly, let us start with the warehouse. You might have more than one warehouse especially if you operate in multiple locations or regionally. And, if you are a wholesaler, who is also a consignor where you will leave your stocks at your consignees at their various retail outlets, you might also want to treat these outlets as your warehouses too to track your stocks movement, sales and returns etc.
If you have a huge warehouse, you might also want to split them into different areas/ zones and in each zone, you might even want to further segregate them into different rows and different levels. This is important as it helps to pinpoint the exact location of your stocks so that you can easily retrieve during stock take or picking.

Secondly, if you are a manufacturer, you can use the system to help you to generate and print your own barcode while as a wholesaler for instance, you are likely to use your manufacturers’ barcode and lot/ batch number to help to track the expiry date if any. But having the need to key in the manufacturer’s lot number can be labour-intensive especially during the GRN stage. Hence, we recommend our customers to ask their manufacturer to provide that information before delivery or even use the system to generate your own unique barcode with lot number and pass it to your manufacturer’s so that they can print and stick it onto the carton to help in your receiving process.
FIFO
Thirdly, upon creation of SO, your staffs will generate the picking lists based on the orders. At this junction, it is naturally that most enterprises will opt for “first in, first out” or “FIFO”. However, this will only work when your warehouse staffs constantly moving the old stocks out to the front while moving the new ones to the end or you are dealing with fast moving items. In a small warehouse, this might be possible but in generally, it is very time consuming, labour-intensive operation and very inefficient.
Another major concern is that if the stocks that you are dealing have expiry date, without enabling lot number and expiry date, naturally, the warehouse staff will pick the stocks that are nearer or easier to pick. With lot number turns on, when generating the picking list, the admin staff can choose the correct part number/ barcode/ lot number for the warehouse staff to pick based on the information provided. This will also help to eliminate the possibilities of picking and sending the wrong items.
However, to solve the quantity issue, you might want to enable the warehouse staff with mobile device to scan the barcode to reflect the quantity. Kindly also note that if the quantity is huge, this step might be impractical and the alternatively solution such as using RFID tags to “scan” in and out in a much faster speed and in batches.
Similarly, for production, the barcode can be used to “draw out” the raw material and upon completion, the finished goods with a different barcode can be used to “put away” into the warehouse.

Fourthly, by using a mobile device, your warehouse staff can perform the stock take to update the current inventory level. The finance staff can verify the inputs and authorise the stock adjustment following by stock closure for the month for instance. This step is essential to calculate the stock costing and of course by enabling the lot number, the finance staff can choose to use “specific” stock costing method where you can get an accurate stock cost instead of “monthly moving average” or “FIFO”.

Multiable M18 ERP is a mid-tier cloud native ERP which runs on cloud or on-premises with configuration in mind to allow users to customise the system to meet different business challenges without paying expensive services to vendor for customisation. Besides providing backend (ERP) solutions, Multiable M18 provides frontend solutions for Point-of-Sales, eCommerce portal known as KopaProand both native M18 mobile app (iOS & Android) & responsive M18 web app to access the system. Multiable M18 is also famous for its seamless integration with other major eCommerce portal such as Magento, Shopify, eBay and JD.com.
Multiable M18 is flexible to fit into any business nature, you are welcome to reach out to our friendly business consultants for free consultation and start hopping to your journey to digital transformation.
Till March 2022, local enterprises can enjoy up to 80% support from the government via the Enterprise Development Grant (EDG). Some special cases might even able to receive up to 90% depending on Enterprise Singapore. On top of this, SkillsFuture Enterprise Credit (SFEC) supports up to 90% of out-of-pocket expense as reimbursement and that gives up to a whopping 98%* financial support from the government.
 
 
Pls contact us at (65) 6537 8749 or *click here* for our friendly colleagues to assist you to move your company to next chapter.

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multiable.com.sg

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