Efficient inventory management is one of the most crucial aspects of growing your business rapidly and staying ahead of your competitors. Managing it can be challenging as it involves numerous tasks. The best you can do is to opt for a warehouse management software system. With its advanced features and top-notch performance, a WMS system transforms the way you manage your inventory.
However, implementing a WMS system isn’t all you need. You must know some effective strategies to optimise inventory with this system. In this post, we will unveil some effective strategies that can help you in this regard.
07 Strategies to Optimise Inventory with WMS System
Demand Forecasting
Demand forecasting is one of the most effective strategies to optimise your inventory. It’s all about predicting the future sales of a specific product. To forecast demand, you first need to collect data. Then you have to analyse it to predict future sales. All types of historical data and market trends must be considered when making predictions.
When you know the expected sales, you can manage inventory in a better way. Your WMS system will enable you to stock only the required products to mitigate the risk of overstocking or understocking.
Categories Items
Categorising the items or products present in your warehouse can also play an important role in optimising the warehouse. ABC analysis techniques can be helpful in this regard. You have to place the most significant items in a category and they will be on priority. It will include all those items that are contributing more than others to overall revenue.
Similarly, you have to place products in categories B and C based on the value they add. This categorization enables your WMS to pay more attention to list A items as they are the most valuable ones. As a result, optimising inventory will become easy for you.
Cycle Counting
It’s an effective approach to check inventory accuracy. It involves counting a portion of inventory items after regular intervals. WMS can automate this counting and assign roles to warehouse personnel for inventory optimization. Furthermore, you can also use it to check the results of counts in real-time and resolve any errors promptly.
Just-in-time (JIT) Inventory
This approach is considered helpful to save storage costs only. However, it can help in optimising inventory as well. It involves receiving only those goods products from suppliers that are needed to profess and fulfil orders. WMS plays a crucial role in this regard.
You can use it to check real-time inventory information, demand forecasting reports, and other data to order only required products. Apart from that, it will help in managing the products after receiving them from the suppliers. The ultimate goal is to limit the number of products stored in inventory which helps in optimising it.
Automation
Managing all the inventory-related tasks manually can take a lot of time and effort and the worst part is that it’s error-prone as well. Therefore, you should use a WMS system to automate various operations.
In addition, the data entry and handling process must be optimised to mitigate the risk of errors and get accurate information. It will not reduce the manual efforts, but speed up inventory management operations as well.
Safety Stock Management
It’s a safe approach to mitigate the risk of stockouts due to varying demands of customers or changes in market trends. Safety stock management is maintaining a buffer inventory which can be used to fulfil orders promptly and efficiently. It is usually based on demand forecasting.
WMS determines the safety stock levels based on demand forecasting reports. It gives you an idea about the changing market trends, enabling you to adjust the inventory accordingly.
Continuous Improvement
The most important thing you need to do to optimise inventory with the WMS system is to focus on continuous improvement. It doesn’t matter how advanced the system you have, there is always room for some improvements. Stay updated about the latest changes and updates. Try to get the latest WMS for your business and train warehouse management staff to use it to get the desired results.
Wrapping Up
There you have it! The aforementioned strategies can be helpful in managing and optimising inventory with a WMS system. Make sure to pay special attention to demand forecasting as it enables you to make informed decisions when stocking items.
Mudassir 
Admin