How to Warehouse.
June 29, 2015 9:03 AM Subscribe
The company I work for is in need of some medium-scale (i think?) inventory tracking, shipping and receiving is a bit outside my wheelhouse; I need to be schooled on best practices, and what to shop for.
I've been tasked with researching an inventory system. I know basically nothing of inventory systems for the scale that we're talking about. Right now, our inventory is controlled with a few key excel documents, and they're becoming a bit unwieldily, and kind of inaccurate; we're growing by quite a bit, and holding some inventory for other companies as well. This is outside the scope of my knowledge, but I'm the one handling our inventory right now…so…here we are. I'm pretty good at setting up systems for our company to follow, but this one requires special hardware and software that I'm just not familiar with.
My boss has asked for a couple of things for the wish-list, I don't even know if these are possible, they're just things we're aiming for;
1. Invoicing will not be handled by our inventory system, we'd like to keep these separate for a couple reasons.
2. Upon intake, we would like to be able to tag each individual item with its pertinent information, and then tag each pallet with the contents (each pallet holds 8 items).
3. The items, while packed on pallets can be difficult to distinguish from each other; we would like an easy, visual account of a pallets contents.
4. Not currently, but eventually we will have inventory at two job sites, so coordination between the two of them would be ideal.
5. Upon items exiting the warehouse, we'd like to be able to track them almost like a toll booth. If it leaves the doors to a staging area, we'd like to notification that it has left. We don't care how this is accomplished (RFID? GPS of some sort?).
6. We'd like the ability to run reports based on what is currently in the space, and where so we can double check the physical location of the items against where the computer thinks everything is.
7. Our initial budget for purchasing hardware and software is high, but we'd like to keep our ongoing operating budget for it as low as possible. (reusable tags, no paid updates, no subscriptions, etc).
8. It absolutely has to be an out of the box solution with real life support; no homebrew, no open source, nothing of the sort. We really don't have time to learn how to build this from scratch (this is as close to a dealbreaker as we get…)
Simply googling 'inventory tracking warehouse systems' is so overwhelming that I don't know what we really need; I'm so green to this area of knowledge that I don't really know what to even search for. We're building this from scratch, so we're really open to any sort of solution that isn't a homebrew setup.
I've been tasked with researching an inventory system. I know basically nothing of inventory systems for the scale that we're talking about. Right now, our inventory is controlled with a few key excel documents, and they're becoming a bit unwieldily, and kind of inaccurate; we're growing by quite a bit, and holding some inventory for other companies as well. This is outside the scope of my knowledge, but I'm the one handling our inventory right now…so…here we are. I'm pretty good at setting up systems for our company to follow, but this one requires special hardware and software that I'm just not familiar with.
My boss has asked for a couple of things for the wish-list, I don't even know if these are possible, they're just things we're aiming for;
1. Invoicing will not be handled by our inventory system, we'd like to keep these separate for a couple reasons.
2. Upon intake, we would like to be able to tag each individual item with its pertinent information, and then tag each pallet with the contents (each pallet holds 8 items).
3. The items, while packed on pallets can be difficult to distinguish from each other; we would like an easy, visual account of a pallets contents.
4. Not currently, but eventually we will have inventory at two job sites, so coordination between the two of them would be ideal.
5. Upon items exiting the warehouse, we'd like to be able to track them almost like a toll booth. If it leaves the doors to a staging area, we'd like to notification that it has left. We don't care how this is accomplished (RFID? GPS of some sort?).
6. We'd like the ability to run reports based on what is currently in the space, and where so we can double check the physical location of the items against where the computer thinks everything is.
7. Our initial budget for purchasing hardware and software is high, but we'd like to keep our ongoing operating budget for it as low as possible. (reusable tags, no paid updates, no subscriptions, etc).
8. It absolutely has to be an out of the box solution with real life support; no homebrew, no open source, nothing of the sort. We really don't have time to learn how to build this from scratch (this is as close to a dealbreaker as we get…)
Simply googling 'inventory tracking warehouse systems' is so overwhelming that I don't know what we really need; I'm so green to this area of knowledge that I don't really know what to even search for. We're building this from scratch, so we're really open to any sort of solution that isn't a homebrew setup.
Yes, you want a WMS. I do not have personal experience with it but I've heard good things about Accellos, and it sounds like it can do what you want.
posted by a strong female character at 10:37 AM on June 29, 2015
posted by a strong female character at 10:37 AM on June 29, 2015
Oh, I do actually know Accellos, or at least I did an implementation with them about 5 years ago. I found them pleasant to work with and pretty accurate with their implementation estimates.
posted by Lyn Never at 11:00 AM on June 29, 2015
posted by Lyn Never at 11:00 AM on June 29, 2015
This thread is closed to new comments.
I just eyeballed the results for "WMS with RFID" and there's plenty. None of them are products I've worked with in the past (I'm on the ERP side), but they do exist and though you have to step over a bunch of marketing crap it is possible to self-educate enough to at least narrow down your options to a few. I would then strongly suggest asking your final candidates to do their full song-and-dance for you and take questions from the stakeholders before you narrow down to a final request for proposal.
posted by Lyn Never at 10:16 AM on June 29, 2015