ARC’s Top 10 Best Practices in WMS
Efficient warehouses are clean, well-ordered with written, available standard
operating procedures that reflect the actual operation of the
warehouse. Moreover, sophisticated Warehouse
Management System (WMS) technology now enables
best practices. Here are our top 10 questions to determine
if your WMS delivers best in class
performance. The best companies in your industry
should answer “Yes” to most questions.
These 10 questions identify weak
warehouse management practices
and processes. Each “YES” indicates
you have achieved a degree of
operational excellence.
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ARC’s Top 10 Best Practices in WMS
1. THOUGHT LEADERS FOR MANUFACTURING & SUPPLY CHAIN
ARC INSIGHTS
By Simon Bragg
These 10 questions identify weak
warehouse management practices
and processes. Each “YES” indicates
you have achieved a degree of
operational excellence.
INSIGHT# 2003-05E
JANUARY 30, 2003
ARC’s Top 10 Best Practices in WMS
Keywords
WMS, OpX, Supply Chain
Summary
Efficient warehouses are clean, well-ordered with written, available stan-
dard operating procedures that reflect the actual operation of the
warehouse. Moreover, sophisticated Warehouse
Management System (WMS) technology now enables
best practices. Here are our top 10 questions to de-
termine if your WMS delivers best in class
performance. The best companies in your industry
should answer “Yes” to most questions.
1. Can You Handle Multiple Orders Simultaneously?
Operators can only tackle one order at a time in paper-managed ware-
houses. About two-thirds of medium sized (10,000 m2) warehouses and
about one-third of large (70,000 m2) warehouses are still paper-based. Im-
proving productivity, by minimizing travel time in the warehouse, requires
sophisticated pick strategies such as task interleaving, wave or 2-phase
picking that are too complex to manage on paper. Radio Frequency (RF)
and bar coding systems let operators handle multiple orders together. Less
than 1 percent of warehouses use voice-directed picking, which improves
productivity of hard to handle items, but may reduce inventory accuracy.
2. Does Your Inventory Accuracy Exceed 99%?
All warehouses should achieve 99 percent bin-level accuracy. The top 10
percent achieve around 99.95 percent accuracy. Regular cycle counting is
the first step. Initially, the system should determines cycle counting sam-
pling frequencies from a pareto analysis of each SKU’s volume value. Next,
the system should help managers focus on error-prone SKU’s. Better algo-
rithms request a count when the bin is easy to count, e.g. instantly after
picking if the slot is empty or has just a couple of items. However, to
achieve 99.95 percent accuracy, the strategy changes because everything
needs to be right. Since a SKU can be in the wrong bin, it is then better to
count by aisle.