Abstract
Warehousing is becoming more and more a critical activity in the supply chain to outperform competitors on customer service, lead times, and costs. However, if warehousing is to be a source of competitive advantage, then the implementation of a warehouse management information system (WMS) is a necessary condition to achieve efficiently the high performance of warehousing operations required in today’s marketplace.
Introduction
Warehousing in the 1990s differs fundamentally from warehousing in the recent past, when warehouses were seen as unavoidable cost centers that served only as large stock-keeping entities. As a result of global competition and supply chain concepts, including a focus on integral inventory control, warehousing has become a critical activity in the supply chain to outperform competitors on customer service, lead-times, and costs (De Koster, 1998).
Warehouses are now (re-)designed and automated for high speed, that is, high throughput rate, and high productivity, to reduce order processing costs. More and more, they change to flow-through warehouses, where products remain in the warehouse for a short period of time only. Timely and accurate information about products, resources and processes are essential to operationalize a planning and control structure that effectively and efficiently achieves the high performance of warehousing operations required in today’s marketplace.
A warehouse management information system (WMS) provides, tores, and reports the information necessary to efficiently manage the flow of products within a warehouse, from time of receipt to time of shipping.
Some of the benefits that a WMS can provide Include increased productivity, reduction of inventories, better.
Space utilization, reduced errors, support of customer EDI requirements, and value added logistics compliance programs. Not surprisingly, the Gartner Group recently stressed that a warehouse without a WMS puts itself at a competitive disadvantage.
Up to about ten years ago, nearly all WMS’s in use were tailor made....
