Term Paper on "Warehouse Management Systems WMS"

Term Paper 10 pages (3044 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Warehouse Management Systems (WMS)

The concept and use of warehousing has transformed essentially from what it was a decade ago to what it is right now. Now with the increased competition and advance technology, warehousing has become a decisive tool in the tug of war within the global market serving as a mechanism to gain advantage over the competitors' product, advertising, prices, consumer services, etc. whereas before it just served as a stock-keeping unit. As mentioned before, the evolvement of warehouses has needed restructuring and superior mechanization so that the result achieved has higher and superior production with lowered prices (Nynke, 2005).

The course of warehousing requires all the essentials needed by any other process of production i.e. precise and opportune provision data on the merchandise, competitors, market prices, capital and accessible developments for the correct and efficient implementation and utilization of the services provided by the warehouse facility. The warehouse management system (WMS) is responsible for the provision of these facts. It takes on the task to supply, accumulate and describe all the necessary statistics to manage this particular operation from the point of arrival till delivery (Nynke, 2005).

The importance of WMS has grown leaps and bounds to the point where, according to the Gartner Group, any company who does not include the process of WMS in their infrastructure is setting themselves up for a disadvantage in the global market. Why has WMS grown so important in the passing of a decade? Its because after the implementation of and efficient structure of WMS, the companies experienced various positive outcomes like developed and intelligent use of the room available, assistance to the consumer EDI necessities, decrease in the amount of registrations, amplified production and efficiency in the process of production, decrease in prices as well as condensed faults (Nynke, 2005).

Scope of Warehouse management Systems

As mentioned above, the main and most essential task of a WMS is to manage or operate the inflow and outflow of the products with the accurate use of the needed statistics and data. The position of WMS in the completion of the process of production is such that it needs to communicate and coordinate with other processes and personnel involved like assembly section of the organization, the monetary officials, merchandise approval, transportation or infrastructure departments, security, industrial structures, like the as/RS management, PLC, etc. For the timely deliverance of the product. All or most of the processes mentioned above can be and mostly are incorporated in one industrial component called enterprise resource planning (ERP) system; so in simpler terms, the WMS has to keep in constant and clear contact with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to implement their function competently (Nynke, 2005).

There is very small similarity and comparability between the operations and dimension of an ERP system and the WMS. The origin of WMS was triggered by the parallels of the data needed, the procedures, the management necessities and the process of ERP. The operations of ERP include a long-term planning and managing of all the significant and peripheral utilities of a business. A WMS essentially deals with the short-term preparation for the stocking of merchandise along with the utilization of the space provided and at times the delivery of the merchandise. Of course, the principles of a WMS are still undeveloped and designed primarily for one significant warehouse and then adjustments were made with the varying requirements and atmospheres of other warehouses (Nynke, 2005). With the rising need of WMS, it is important that we study the essential functions of a WMS. This will provide us with a clear picture of how WMS helps organizations gain competitive advantage.

Functions of Warehouse management Systems

Jacobs et al. (1997) and Baan (1998) (as cited in Nynke, 2005) both agree on certain functions of the warehouse management system that are:

1) Inter-Warehouse organizational functions;

2) Warehouse organizational functions; and 3) Warehouse implementation organizational functions.

These functions have been further subdivided to present a clear idea of the whole process. Some of the significant subdivisions are: the task of transforming or developing, with new advancements, the operational facilities of the warehouses which could either be done under the administration of the fundamental warehouses, production cores, or contractors; keeping a check on the stored products and their groups with the required information on their price, variety and ABC assessment along with the variety of merchandise required or demanded by the customers; to keep a track and check on the flow and sales of all their products in order to assist the administration for potential choices or amendments; and, to keep a track of the grouping of warehousing facilities and the transportation or infrastructure costs (as cited in Nynke, 2005).

The warehouse management functions are also further subdivided, some of these include: the every day development and movement inspections i.e. The orders not yet completed, filling of required documents, etc.; operational synopses of varying kinds, like the departure of trucks or the delivery timelines, etc.; accounts required for durable effectiveness i.e. task allocation, apace adjustments, etc.; to carefully analyze the capital and its appropriate use and to act out the operations with efficiency and timely speed; to carefully analyze the diverse sectors of storage space, counting the scopes, regulations for the stock-storage, carriage plans, and the storage atmosphere; and, to analyze, through the market flow assessments made, the products that are either out of demand, or decreasing in demand, or are outdated or dormant and then act accordingly (as cited in Nynke, 2005).

The warehouse execution function is a much more vast process feature. It includes, broadly speaking, the functional preparation, implementation and management of the overall setup. These include: managing all the tasks that have a direct or indirect material operative with the customs or tax connected actions; the careful examination and administration of products to decide their future functions; to make out sufficient tactics and directive over the inflow and outflow of the products stored in the facility, their location on the facility in accordance to the regulations; to plan out tactics for the control service activities; the parceling or re-parceling of products for safety and endurance during shipping; the movement of the stock whether it be into, within or from the facility including the transportation to different markets or consumer targets; the shipping procedures including the stacking, unloading, customs permission, invoices, etc.; the physical or material analysis of the stock along with its scheduling, record and legalization done at hand; to administer a setup that manages the pick stock whether individually or from a whole volume of products; and, the processes involved in the collection and registration of data from the moment the product is reported to have been shipped towards the dock i.e. implementing and managing the functions of loading the products off the ship into the warehouse with validation received from primary procurement contract, these products could either be from the contractor, other warehouses for replacement, from a dissatisfied customer or returned form the markets due to inactivity or decrease in demand, in addition to that, every unanticipated return of product has to go through a process of identification and has to be authentication for re-procurement after collecting the relevant statistics and data (as cited in Nynke, 2005).

Finally, to classify or categorize the functions warehouse management systems (WMS), we can clearly see three arrangements after evaluating Dusseldorf's (1996; as cited in Nynke, 2005) view: the three sorts of WMS would be basic, advanced and complex, each having its own characteristics and tasks to perform. By a basic WMS we mean something that in managing only a small section of the whole process, in most cases a basic WMS is in charge of the storage and locality organization alone, which makes its plain and easy in dimension concentrating only on the throughput. The basic WMS utilizes the inspection setups to identify goods in storage, ascertain their arrangement in the warehouse and catalogs them too, while also setting down the norms of loading and unloading using the RF-systems. Advanced WMS takes this function another step and adds the task of storage and volume or space assessment in its responsibilities i.e. It designs the usage of the capital or assets available as well as the daily workouts of the products into and out of the warehouse. Complex WMS is the amalgamation of the preparation, implementation and management of the functions and operations of a group of warehouses; in this particular sort the WMS can utilize various advanced technologies like as/RS, sorter, AGV, robots, etc. And adds peripheral tasks like shipping facilities and scheduling, locating products, in-flow and out-flow preparation of the products, value added logistics preparation as well as advancing and developing the restrictive regulations and operations of the warehouses at large (as cited in Nynke, 2005).

Having studied the functions of WMS, it is important that we also take into account the aspects necessary to consider what kind of WMS should organizations choose. This is because each organization has its own set of… READ MORE

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