Inventory Management Software

Order processing and inventory management for complex fulfilment

OrderFlow WMS inventory management software has been engineered from the ground up with configurability in mind. Our warehouse management system supports complex business requirements without compromising quality and reliability.

Bringing simplicity and efficiency to your fulfilment processes

The OrderFlow WMS platform delivers powerful warehouse management and order-processing functionality in a way that's easy to use and understand. Sophisticated business logic is embedded in a simple interface that new members of your team will be able to follow straight away.

Goods in

OrderFlow supports a wide range of options for receiving incoming deliveries.

Deliveries can be received against purchase orders or advanced shipping notes (ASNs). Many different flavours of goods receipt are support out of the box, to handle a wide range of scenarios, including:

  • Pallet receipt using licence plates
  • Single and multi-line cross docking
  • Item by item receipt
  • Product lot and serial number capture
  • Unit of measure capture (e.g. inner/outer cartons)
  • Receipt to inspection/quarantine
  • Damaged stock handling
  • Provisional stock receipt using ASNs
  • Combined receipt and putaway

Putaway

OrderFlow gives you complete control over how you use your available space.

Putaway can be directed, with location chosen by the system, or assisted, with locations chosen by the user with help from the system.

Putaway location selection can follow a simple scheme, but can also be tailored to meet sophisticated requirements.

Putaway rules can be based on:

  • Location or area preference settings
  • The presence of existing stock and the remaining space
  • Item, case or pallet receipt
  • product characteristics

The slotting logic can tie stock keeping units (SKUs) to specific locations, ensure popular SKUs are spread across the pickface and  that items from different batches are never held together.

OrderFlow WMS gives you complete control of your slotting logic.

Stock management

OrderFlow provides a complete audit trail of all stock movements and user activity.

Our customers rely on OrderFlow’s stock management capability to drive warehouse activity and to know where everything is, where it’s been and where it’s going.

Stock is recorded on the system according to the location, product, product lot and unit of measure.

Each stock record has a status, which can be changed without any physical movements.

Each movement or adjustment is individually recorded, as is each stock status change.

OrderFlow features a powerful stock move task framework, which is used for many of the warehouse operations, including putaway and replenishment.

The WMS also features an advanced stock checking module, which allows for a coherent, targeted and efficient stock checking regime, with each location stock check individually recorded.

Order processing

OrderFlow ensures your fulfilment processes are fast, efficient and accurate.

OrderFlow ensures you to get your orders out of the door quickly, with minimal effort, and in the right order.

  • Complete visibility of the current status of your order pool
  • Automatically assign each order a target despatch time and track the progress of the despatch team towards cutoff
  • Identify and prioritise urgent orders
  • Continually track and refine the time taken to fulfil each order

OrderFlow is designed to support B2C fulfilment operations that drive complex business processes in high volume environments.

Picking

Picking is the heart of any warehouse operation. OrderFlow lets you choose the best picking strategies for your business.

OrderFlow provides all of the picking options you need to reach peak efficiency in your warehouse.

  • Paper or handheld picking options
  • Individual or batch picking
  • Wave picking
  • Zone-based picking to consolidation
  • Cluster picking
  • Picking to put wall

Most commonly used is batch picking, with powerful options ranging from:

  • Zone-specific batches
  • Single product batches
  • Multi-product batches for specific products only
  • Batching by priority, courier, destination, etc.
  • Timed release of batches

Orders can be assigned to picking locations to minimise picking distance, helping you to pick more orders with less effort.

Packing

OrderFlow’s fine tuned packing processes ensure that shipments are sent out with unerring accuracy.

At the same time OrderFlow strives for every ounce of efficiency at the packing desk, where each keystroke counts.

For most orders, this involves scanning each product at the packing desk. Other related features include:

  • Non-barcoded product identification (using images)
  • Lot or serial number capture
  • Package identification during the ‘scan to pack’
  • Auto-printing of despatch notes and labels as the packing desk
  • Scanning of consumables

For large orders, OrderFlow also allows for a persisted scan to pack, with each scan individually recorded.

This allows for packers to take a lunch or overnight shift break midway through the scan to pack operation, and pick up where they left off afterwards.

Despatch

OrderFlow provides a comprehensive suite of tools to drive your post-packing processes.

OrderFlow’s transportation module allows individual shipments to be tracked from your packing desks through the outgoing area and onto the relevant courier transportation.

Handheld processes allows users to sort packed shipments onto pallets, which in turn are scanned onto the individual trailers and vans departing from the warehouse.

Returns

OrderFlow makes it easy to capture all of the information you need to manage your returns process.

OrderFlow allows you to exert the right level of control over returned items.

Options around returns functionality include:

  • Returns with or without a return merchant authorization (RMA)
  • Pre-notification of returns to be received
  • Validation against outgoing orders and/or quantities
  • Capture of return reason code and condition, with image
  • Lot and serial number capture on returned items
  • Third-party notification on returned items

 

Support for perishable and batch tracked products

The OrderFlow lot tracking module ensures foodstuffs and other perishable can be tracked through all your warehouse processes

The lot tracking module can require expiry date and other batch specifc information to be captured at goods-in as part of the receipting process.

Other related features include:

  • ensuring the stock assigned to different types of customer order has sufficient remaining shelf life
  • ensuring rules about whether or not different lots of the same SKU can be held together are enforced
  • where appropriate, making sure customer orders are all fulfilled from a single lot
  • Identifying when items are approaching their useful shelflife and managing the process of removing them from stock

What is Inventory Management?

Inventory management is the heart of every WMS. At its very simplest inventory management is the process of dividing up your available storage space into distinct locations and then keeping track of stock moves in and out of the warehouse and between locations. Your WMS should also allow you to define the rules which determine how your stock is distributed within the warehouse and keep a record of all historic stock movements.

Within that basic requirement there are lots of different priorities that can often conflict with one another. The need to use space efficiently, the need to minimise the distance travelled whenever stock is moved, the physical nature of the items and a host of other factors will all play a part in determining the optimal design of the business rules that control the management of stock in your operation. The way all the different constraints and priorities interact usually means that the best approach in one warehouse is not going to work well in another.

Inventory Management Software

OrderFlow provides a range of tools that allow us to deliver the optimal solution for your warehouse operation. Some of the key elements of the design are described in more detail below:

Advanced Inventory Management

Space utilisation

Warehouse space is expensive and most operations find it’s in short supply, particularly pick face locations that are accessible from the ground. If you capture the dimensions of your warehouse locations and the dimensions of your products OrderFlow will start to track the space used and the remaining space available, feeding this into the initial stock putaway, stock replenishments and all other stock movements.

OrderFlow can match the volumetric data about the stock that needs to be put away or moved into the pick face with the space available in the target locations to ensure the optimal location is selected.

SKU characteristics and SKU velocity

The nature of the item may play a large part in determining the valid target locations for it. Most obviously if you have ambient, chilled and frozen areas of your warehouse you need to be able to restrict different product categories to the appropriate areas. Within an area you might want to ensure heavy or potentially unstable SKUs are always held at ground level, ensure that loose items are held in suitable bins while others go on appropriate shelving.

SKU velocity is a measure of how frequently a particular SKU is picked. OrderFlow can ensure that high velocity SKUs are held in the most easily accessed locations or ensure that they are held in multiple locations spread across in different aisles.

Tracking product lots

OrderFlow provides a flexible framework within which the product lot (or batch) information for some SKUs is captured on receipt and then associated with the relevant items as they move through every warehouse process. Other SKUs might just require the user to capture a lot reference or unique serial number at the point the item is added to an outgoing customer shipment.

Detailed lot tracking can impose significant restrictions on the operational processes within a warehouse, OrderFlow makes these transparent to the users and ensures the integrity of the lot tracking process for food manufacture and other sectors where traceability is critical.

Lot tracking is covered in more detail in a dedicated article here.

Tracking units of measure

There can be significant benefits of being able to default different warehouse operations to the most appropriate unit of measure relevant to the SKU. As an example; a SKU might need to be sold individually but always be received into the warehouse in cases that contain six cartons, with each carton containing twelve items. You might want to capture case quantities on receipt, replenish the pick face in carton quantities but always require your pickers to confirm the pick of individual items.

OrderFlow can support situations where all the different units of measure are identified by the same barcode and situations where each UoM for a SKU is distinguished by a unique barcode, making it easy to infer the quantity from the barcode value being scanned.

Supporting multiple units of measure can make warehouse moves more efficient but it becomes essential in environments that need to support both trade and consumer orders. Consumer orders are generally for item quantities while trade orders are often require full cases. OrderFlow is able to support situations where some trade orders specify the case quantities required and others may specify unit quantities, requiring OrderFlow to round the quantity to be picked up or down to avoid the need to break cases.

Reporting

OrderFlow holds detailed real-time information about every task, order and stock move completed. The reporting function makes it easy to access this information to proactively manage your business.

The WMS provides a comprehensive library of built-in reports and a flexible framework for defining custom reports tailored to your specific business needs.

Custom reports can be built from scratch or created by cloning and then editing existing reports. If required, any report can be automated and sent directly to recipients at predetermined times.

On-screen dashboards can be accessed 24/7, displaying key information on every aspect of your warehouse management and order processing. The reporting framework allows these dashboards to be easily tailored to your the business’ and  individual users’ requirements.

Key information can also be accessed via our mobile phone app which means that you can always stay up to date while you are on the move or away from your desk.

wms reporting

Seamless courier integration

Producing the right courier labels quickly and accurately at the point they are needed is critical to warehouse efficiency and and keeping customers happy.

  • Choose from dozens of integrations. Select from over 40 courier integrations, either directly with individual carriers or indirectly through 3rd party platforms.
  • Leverage your existing courier relationships. Take advantage of your own negotiated shipping rates to get the best deal on your shipping. We’re happy to work with all carriers and don’t earn commissions from any of the third-party services we integrate with.
  • Apply your own shipping rules. We make it easy for you to configure couriers and service selections based on destination, priority and other business rules.
courier integration

Powerful warehouse integrations

OrderFlow WMS’ integration framework will support all your integration needs. Built-in integrations include the leading e-commerce platforms Shopify, Magento One, Magento Two, Spree, WooCommerce and others.

OrderFlow also integrates with channel management systems, ERPs, customer service and accountancy platforms.

The integration framework also allows us to integrate with any platform that provides a public application programming interface (API).

Perhaps uniquely among warehouse management systems, our integrations can be built almost entirely via configuration (rather than code), dramatically reducing the effort required to build a new integration.

powerful warehouse integrations

Arrange a demo to discuss how OrderFlow could help your business

Leave your contact details and we will get in touch to schedule a time for a remote meeting.

Meetings typically take around 45 minutes to an hour. We will take time to understand the particular characteristics of your business before walking through an informal demonstration of the OrderFlow platform that focuses on the areas most relevant to you.

orderflow demo
Warehouse manager looking at tablet and thinking about WMS and order processing
"OrderFlow is very good for reporting – you get dashboards that give you a real-time snapshot of what’s going on, but then you’ve also got the report library, where you can extract more detailed information."
Mark Hadley, Pro FS
"One of the big advantages of OrderFlow is how it connects with different third party systems like e-commerce platforms such as Magento, ERP systems and couriers."
Peter Bergsma, Axell Logistics’ IT and Engineering Manager
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