When it comes to receiving goods and looking for somewhere to put them, a modern WMS can surpass the knowledge of even your most competent warehouse operative. It can do this because it holds a map of the storage locations in your warehouse and records what’s stored in them in real time. 

Advantages of WMS Putaway

This means that when you receive goods for putaway, the WMS can calculate in an instant the best place to put them. By doing this it reduces the time you need to spend looking for space and recording your actions. It’s also unerringly accurate.

And as most warehouse managers would tell you, getting this right will save even more time when it comes to picking the goods for despatch. Your pickers can be directed straight to the right location to find a product of the correct batch, rotation or other criteria as required. But as well as saving the time you’d use looking for somewhere to place a product, or knowing exactly where to go and pick it, it also helps you optimise usage of available space to get a better return on costs.

So why would it be difficult to accept that such functionality can provide an operational benefit?

Why Do Some Prefer Standard Warehouse Putway Processes?

There are a number of explanations for this. Naturally, people unused to working with a WMS will have confidence in their staff and trust them to “know how to do things best”. But often this can mean reliance on one or two people in the operation. Which prompts the inevitable question: “what happens if Fred, or Freda gets run over by a bus?” Who would know best then? There is also a misconception that a system can’t be as flexible as your trusty staff when it comes to dealing with particular requirements or handling exceptions. 

However, with the functionality offered by a modern WMS system this just isn’t true anymore. An example of this is the commonly stated requirement to “keep everything together” meaning all goods for a certain customer, or of a specific range or product type. Well, if there’s one thing that a good WMS can do, it’s that.

WMS Putaway Strategies

It could be argued that keeping everything together is not the most efficient way to store and pick goods, but we’ll leave that to another day! Most modern WMS will offer some form of rules-based ‘putaway strategy’. This allows the system user to create rules that determine where and how goods can be stored. These rules are referenced in split seconds by the system in order to decide where incoming stock can be placed. However good your staff are, it’s unlikely they can do this!

This strategy includes so-called ‘hard rules’, things like keeping the same products or same date rotation together, and the ability to mix products (or not!) in locations. But it also covers preferences about which storage zones or locations are used and in what sequence, as well as preferences based on product, like where to store fast or slow movers, and the need to activate things like pick location ‘top-up’. In short, there is little you’d need that can’t be decided for you by the system.

The other common objection centres on the belief that a human user can handle variations faster than a system. There seems to be a fear that if a system-generated instruction needs to be varied this will be operationally difficult. Another fallacy!

A modern WMS will provide the means to handle variations with ease, and with systems that use handheld computers this can usually be done instantly and in real-time by your staff on the ground, with no supervisor intervention.

So, if for example a system instruction to place goods into one location cannot be carried out, the user can simply select (or automatically request) another location and confirm this to the system. If the quantity to put away is incorrect due to a miscount, a user can be allowed to correct this and update the system at the point of putaway.  And if incorrect for other reasons it can be logged as a problem allowing a supervisor to investigate while the operative continues with other tasks.

Key Benefit

Perhaps the chief benefit of the system-made decision here is the effective management of space. Storage space is expensive, and logistics operators in competitive fields can operate close to capacity, where every litre of space is vital. A good system will make optimum decisions based on defined location capacities, either numeric or volumetric. So whatever your chosen strategy you will use space to its full potential. It removes the need to worry about where and how to store things, giving you more time to focus on despatching orders to your customers.