Think warehouses and you can think of mega centers, filled with pallets, racks, crates, forklifts, and high-volume order movement. There are trucks constantly moving in and out of the yard. In simple words, there’s continuous movement and updates happening every minute across the warehouse.
When this movement isn’t properly tracked or updated, there’s chaos. Long waiting times for trucks in the yard, going up to multiple hours, pushing the lead times into ‘delay’ categories. Even after these delays, there are multiple errors in missed or misplaced items.
Pickers and handlers, many-a-times, work with a paper-based daily run sheet. Without proper workflow-driven sorting and loading, missing orders are only discovered after the delivery.
Further, if you intend to bring consistency and profitability in your operations with capacity optimization, then the oft-paper-based movement tracking would always be an impediment. Let’s start at this point.
Challenge 1: No standardization in capacity optimization | Solution: Intelligent Warehouse Management (IWM)
Warehouses and logistics service providers would agree that one of the key drivers of efficiency is ‘palletization’. The essence of palletization is proper planning and scheduling of order pickups, staging, loading, and dispatch.
Palletization involves using standard pallets to establish identifiable capacity units. This results in easy loading and turning less than truckloads to full truckloads. This results in timely dispatch, better economies of scale, and traceable units (down to every item, in a crate, in a pallet, in a truck, etc.).
To enable such mature optimization processes, you need the best intelligent warehouse management solution by your side.
Crave InfoTech’s Intelligent Warehouse Management solution – cWarehouse, with the power of SAP’s intelligent Business Technology Platform, helps streamline all order planning, scheduling, tracking, and optimization. Its pre-built smart workflows help streamline the picking and staging process in accordance with the stacking methodology (last in last out, first in last out, etc.).
Challenge 2: Finding and tracking each item through the order journey | Solution: RFID scanning and IoT
Warehouses, in the age of mega-distribution centers, stretch across thousands of yards. Finding a simple iPhone charger in this vast expanse can be a lengthy task without a proper digitized location mapping solution.
Crave InfoTech has active partnerships with location mapping tech leaders like Here Maps for perfect and full warehouse mapping. Now, the picker would know exactly where the charger is located, in which bin, on which rack, and in which corner of the warehouse. They would also see the shortest path to the item within their smart handheld devices.
These handheld devices run Crave InfoTech’s UI-optimized cWarehouse that has preset workflows for easy picking and staging.
All incoming orders are automatically aligned and scheduled in the right manner as they appear on the picker’s device. They, then, follow the suggested path (within the device) to reach the item quickly.
Here comes the next big advantage: RFID scanning.
The picker can simply scan the item with their RFID scanners. These scanners could be built into the device or could be as simple as finger scanners. Just point and scan.
Crave InfoTech has also partnered with Zebra Technologies, the leader in robust yet smart computing devices. This helps put the best devices in the right hands at the right time, with zero lags and fast scanning. These devices can pick up fine barcodes even from a distance of multiple feet.
The details of the scanned items are auto-pulled into the device and the workflow. This helps track the orders (items) at each stage of the fulfillment.
All through the staging and loading processes, the pickers and handlers scan the items and automatically update the processes (as per the workflow). This means that all items, as per their service level agreements, timelines, delivery locations, etc. can be set to a single pallet for effective loading.
For additional precision, the handlers can also use smart glasses that push higher efficiency and optimization.
Challenge 3: Becoming future-proof in a rapidly changing environment | Solution: Agility, control, and scalability with IWM
According to a recently published report, by 2024, the global warehousing industry is set to reach $326 billion in value. For the past many years, we have seen the advent of fast deliveries and easy returns. So much so, that it’s become a standard expectation even in a business-to-business delivery environment.
It’s important, even critical, to undertake a digitization revolution that would make your warehouse operations future-proof.
Crave InfoTech is the right partner for you, to take you through this digitization journey and up the warehouse maturity curve. We have the expertise and intelligent systems to induce agility, control, and scalability in your operations.
With the predictability, ingrained via our tech solutions, you would be able to tide over all market-triggered demand fluctuations whether it’s due to fuel prices, driver shortages, geopolitical crises (like the supply chain issues due to Covid-19 or the Russia-Ukraine conflict), etc.
In all internal or external scenarios, you would be in total control to adapt and react quickly. Such quick reactions and adjustments would help sustain profitable operations across situations. In other words, Crave InfoTech doesn’t just ensure that you stand at the pinnacle of success with industry-leading solutions, but also react fast and effectively to buffer your operations against crisis (even capitalize on the same).
These were the top 3 warehousing challenges and their Crave-driven solutions. Would you want to enable these solutions for your enterprise? Just get in touch.
