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The term ‘scalability’ in an IT sense implies an ability to cope with more; more concurrent users, more orders, more transactions or data. In the computing world a system is said to be scalable if it can cope with massive increases in the load placed on it by the users doing more of whatever it is they do.
When used in the IT sense most WMS platforms can be said to be scalable. Increasing the number of concurrent users or warehouses, doubling the size of your product catalog or the number of orders you despatch might require more system resource but unless your business suddenly starts handling millions more transactions a day it’s unlikely to be difficult to cope with the increased load. However, when people talk about scalability in a WMS context they aren’t thinking about doing more of the same, they’re thinking about the ability to do things differently.
As Volumes Grow Your Processes Have To Change
This is the fundamental rule that will determine whether your WMS is able to support significant increases in throughput. A WMS that can only support one flavour of delivery receipt, a limited number of inflexible picking or replenishment strategies or which can’t be tailored to any of your other key processes is not going to scale in the way growing volumes will require.
In low volume environments warehouse processes (e.g. receipt and putaway, replenishment, picking, packing, kitting, stock checking etc.) are optimised to suit the typical requirements of your warehouse. For example the warehouse might receive most of it’s incoming stock in mixed pallets and occasionally receive a single SKU pallet, it might handle outgoing orders to international addresses manually or only despatch the occasional B2C multiline order. These outliers may be supported by the WMS but as volumes are low it doesn’t matter if they’re inefficient.
As volumes grow these outliers start to consume a disproportionate amount of time and it becomes increasingly easy to cost justify the work required to introduce efficient ways of coping with the outliers.
Below are a few examples of how a single standardized process might evolve as volumes increase and it becomes necessary to introduce optimised processes for subsets of your warehouse operation.
|
A single process optimised |
Refinements that allow your |
| A single putaway process for both pallet and case deliveries | Optimised processes available for either single SKU or mixed pallets, linked to supplier ASNs |
| The ability to use manufacturer product and case barcodes where they are available | Support for GS1 barcodes that encode product lot information and unique pallet licence plates. |
| Multiline orders picked across multiple pick faces | Multiline order that require stock from multiple pick faces can be picked in separate operations and merged before packing |
| A rolling schedule of background stock-checking | Background stock checks complemented by in-line stock checks that require pickers to confirm the remaining stock in off-peak periods |
| Automated replenishment drives the movement of stock from bulk storage into pick face locations | Dynamic replenishment adjusts the quantities moved to reflect demand and ensures the fastest moving SKUs are present in every picking aisle |
Introducing Automation
As your warehouse volumes increase the business justification for dedicated hardware to improve your throughput or use of space becomes easier and easier. Warehouse robotics, automated packing machines, integrated scales, push-through racking and all sorts of other options become more attractive as volumes grow. However in order to ensure it can be used effectively it has to be integrated into the WMS environment and into the processes that sit upstream and downstream of the new hardware. Providing this sort of configurability and integration is what makes a WMS ‘scalable’.
Demanding more from your suppliers
As your warehouse volumes increase the advantages of product barcoding become more and more compelling, with luck increasing volumes may allow allow you to push some or all of the barcoding effort back to your suppliers. If your suppliers are prepared to barcode everything at source, ideally with different barcodes for item and case quantities, it can have significant operational benefits. If your WMS is also able to capture information provided in SSCC labels (https://www.gs1.org/standards/id-keys/sscc) it can provide another significant saving in the time and effort required to process deliveries from suppliers who can support SSCC pallet labelling.
Removing dependencies on key staff
One option for improving the throughput of your warehouse is to extend your operational hours, adding morning, evening or weekend shifts. However, that won’t be possible if your current processes rely on the presence of key members of staff who can’t be on-hand all the time. The answer is to ensure that your WMS configuration is able to support less experienced users by embedding the business logic and decision making that is currently provided by those key members of staff. This removes the need for key team members to be on-hand all the time and makes it possible to introduce temporary staff when they’re required/
The platform is only half the story, you will need the right support
All modern WMS platforms should be able to support dramatic increases in throughput but real scalability will require you and your WMS partner to refine your existing processes to do things differently. This is the subject of another post but if you are looking for a partner that takes the time to understand your business and can suggest options that address the challenges that growth can bring why not give us a call on 01249 750564 or drop an email to enquiries@orderflow-wms.co.uk.