Scaling up your warehouse capacity to handle seasonal peaks is an annual challenge for many organisations. It’s tempting to resort to inefficient workarounds or employ extra people, but this usually introduces higher costs and potential errors. The answer is to be smarter in the way you manage and operate your warehouse by using a modern flexible WMS that can be tailored to your individual challenges.

A Warehouse Management System (WMS) allows you to be “smarter” by providing real-time visibility into your inventory levels, optimizing storage locations, streamlining picking and packing processes, identifying inefficiencies, and enabling data-driven decision making, ultimately leading to increased productivity and reduced costs within your warehouse operations.

The phrase “work hard is important but work smart is better” is particularly relevant to running a warehouse during a peak period. The key to success is the smart management of the following key elements:

• Smart use of resources
• Smart use of time
• Smart use of space

Here’s why leveraging a smart WMS that gives you the tools to manage your warehouse more effectively is the right choice:

Smarter use of Resources

A modern flexible WMS such as OrderFlow will enable you to make the best use of your staff’s time by optimising processes such as order picking, inventory management, and shipping. It will ensure that the most efficient routes are taken by staff at each stage and tasks are completed in the most time effective way.

1. Efficient Order Picking – A smart WMS will enable you to deploy the most efficient picking strategy for any given circumstances. Strategies such as wave picking, batch picking and zone picking will reduce your picker’s walks and enable them to pick faster and more accurately.
2. Efficient Packing – A smart WMS will enable you to balance the work load between your pickers and packers to maximise the throughput of orders. The system will generate detailed packing instructions to increase speed and accuracy and ensure the correct packaging is used.
3. Management of Staff Performance – A smart WMS will track the productivity of each member of staff and each task. This will enable you to identify training and process improvements and track any changes that you implement.
4. Faster onboarding of temporary staff. During peak busy periods many organisations will need to employ temporary staff. With a smart WMS, new employees or temporary workers can be quickly onboarded using the system’s guided workflows. The system can provide instructions, error-proof picking paths, helping them get up to speed quickly during busy periods.
5. Real-time visibility – A tailored WMS will provide you with reports and dashboards customised to your organisation. This will enable you to plan and make decisions based on real-time information. This type of information will enable you to identify bottlenecks in any part of the process and take appropriate action
6. Reporting and Analytics – Modern  WMS’s will also provide you with detailed KPI reports which can be used to improve planning. This included pick & pack speed and accuracy, inventory turnover and returns.

Smarter use of Time

In a busy peak period, it is easy to get into the mind set of all hands to the pump and everyone push as hard as you can. However, this is failing to effectively managing two resources, your time and the time of your staff. A modern WMS plays a key role in managing these resources.

1. Accurate Inventory Management – A modern WMS such as OrderFlow will continually monitor your stock levels and provide you with automated re-order alerts to ensure that you never run out of stock. Live stock levels are fed to all your sales channels to ensure that you never stockout or overstock. Critically, as the system tells your staff exactly were stock is located, no time is wasted searching for it. As well as improve speed and picking accuracy it also makes FIFO and batch tracking much easier to implement.
2. Automating routine processes – In busy periods when resources are at a premium, the ability to automate mundane repetitive tasks is a real benefit. Tasks such as inventory tracking, stock replenishment, order batching can be system driven. This frees up time which can be reallocated to other tasks in the warehouse.
3. Resource Management & Allocation- A modern WMS like OrderFlow will provide you with a wide range of reports than can be customised to the different parts of your organisation. Analysing the data will enable you to predict peaks and troughs in demand and plan your resources and stock levels accordingly. Planning for the peak periods enables you to manage more effectively rather than relying on temporary staff.
4. Improved speed and accuracy –  Providing your staff with a modern WMS combined with handheld scanners will improve speed, capacity and accuracy in all areas of the warehouse. This is critical during periods when tired staff are more likely to make mistakes, which then require more time to correct.

Smarter use of Space

One of the key resources in your warehouse which has a massive impact on efficiency is storage space. It goes with out saying that during peak periods your warehouse will need to accommodate a lot more stock. If you can’t utilise your space effectively you are going to encounter major problems during peak periods:

1. You run the risk that you will run out of space to store the stock and you will need to source additional storage.
2. If you run out of room in the racking, you will forced to hold stock in the aisles, making it difficult for your staff to find what they need and navigate through the warehouse. When stock is no longer held in well defined locations operational errors and inefficiencies start to snowball.

A modern WMS such as OrderFlow which can be tailored to your particular requirements provides the tools to solve these issues.

• Efficient Space Optimisation – This functionality will allocate specific storage locations based on item size, weight, and demand. This maximises the space in the warehouse, reduces unused space and increased picking speeds.

• Product slotting tailored to you organisation – The slotting logic can tie SKUs to specific locations, ensure popular ones are spread across the pick face and that items from different batches are never held together.
• Reduced picking errors – Handheld picking and well designed exception handling catches errors at source, stopping minor problems slowing down the wider operation.

OrderFlow – scalable solutions, tailored to your needs

OrderFlow provide a managed WMS service tailored to our clients individual needs, which includes the flexibility to handle seasonal peaks in demand as well as business growth and additional requirements.

Our systems can scale up operations to manage more orders, process a higher volume of products, and handle complex tasks, all while maintaining accuracy. This reduces the need for hiring temporary staff, which often leads to training costs and potential mistakes.

Our systems allow for flexible operations, making it easier to adjust workflows based on real-time conditions (e.g., seasonal spikes in order volume, changing inventory levels). This flexibility is crucial during peak periods when demand may fluctuate unexpectedly and you need to make smart decisions to manage your key resources.

It is not just busy peak periods that will cause capacity issues in your warehouse. If your business is growing, you are almost certainly going to need to be able to increase your warehouses capacity and handle new requirements. A flexible future proof solution such as OrderFlow rather than an “off the shelf system “ will enable you meet these type of challenges.

If you planning to increase the efficiency of your warehouse operation and would like to understand how OrderFlow could help your organisation, click here to get in touch with us.

Or why not give us a call on 01249 750564 or drop an email to enquiries@orderflow-wms.co.uk to find out more?