February 26, 2020 
Over the years, the eCommerce landscape is undergoing a paradigm shift. And, as eCommerce retailers, you need to up your efforts to cater to the evolving changes.
The retail space is experiencing substantial changes, lately, that can be attributed to the breakthrough technological advancements and innovations. The evolving customer expectation is another major change that today’s retailers are still getting used to.
While technological advancements have encouraged retailers to replace their manual efforts with automated solutions, evolving customer expectations have kept them on their toes.
Today’s Gen-Z customers being highly tech-savvy are relying on an omnichannel retailing approach. They might actually check out a brand on their desktop, however, they will place the order on the app.
Warehouse Management System Overview
Despite all the phenomenal changes, one thing remains constant. And, that is, the significance of warehouse management. Unlike conventional warehouse management practices, modern retailers rely more on on-premise or SaaS Warehouse Management Systems (WMSs).
Warehouse management systems facilitate day-to-day warehouse functions in a more efficient manner. WMSs guide inventory receiving, order processing, shipping and inventory replenishment.
Significance of Warehouse Management Systems for the Retail Industry
Error-free & Efficient Inventory Management
A WMS is vital for error-free and efficient inventory management, optimizes the order fulfillment process and enables the warehouse management team with a holistic view of daily operations. This tracking and performance measurement ability bestowed by a WMS are crucial for the success of the retailers.
A WMS helps track inventory across multiple warehouse locations. A study cites that 34% of businesses do experience shipping delays due to the unavailability of stock at the right time. However, a WMS enables real-time information and updates so that stock management is a smooth sail.
Vin eRetail WMS solution ensures that warehouse and inventory management remain a smooth affair for the retail brands. It is the ultimate solution for retailers to respond better to the ever-changing consumer expectations. It enables the exact mapping of inventory to forecast the inventory replenishment need on time.
Enhanced Productivity
Retail business scalability and growth are often accompanied by busy times in the warehouses. Researches have cited that businesses either had to pay more to the existing warehouse staff or pull resources from other departments to cater to the growing warehousing operational requirements.
However, with a Warehouse Management System in place, the retailers can rest assured. The WMS optimizes operational efficiency and ensures stringent quality control at the warehouse front. Retailers can bank on these WMSs for speed, accuracy, and precision. Besides, WMSs optimize time and resource management improves labor productivity.
Vin eRetail enables the retailers to promptly scale up their sales and ROI. Further, the automated SaaS WMS solution is error-free, which consequently leads to enhanced customer engagement levels.
WMS solutions offer retailers a competitive advantage in terms of cost reduction. SaaS warehouse solutions do not incur any infrastructure management costs. Further, a WMS enables retailers to garner greater profit as third-party WMS vendors or service providers take care of the installation to training aspects.
A warehouse management system eliminates the need for an in-house experts’ team as the WMS solution is hosted on remote servers, making information accessible 24/7. In addition, WMSs come with greater integration and cross-platform compatibility. It helps streamline a retailer’s entire supply chain and logistics processes from end-to-end.
In addition, a warehouse management system also provides labour planning feedback to the warehouse management team. Based on order loads, a warehouse management system can estimate the number of personnel needed to complete the day’s activities. This forecast and planning feature of the WMS is indeed a massive advantage.
Greater Relationship Management
Warehouse management is not a standalone business function. It rather involves a multitude of personnel varying in experience and expertise. Warehouse personnel and the end customers are the most crucial stakeholders in the warehouse ecosystem and thus, the WMS is of utmost significance to them.
With WMSs in place, customers enjoy a myriad of benefits in terms of improved order fulfillment and accuracy levels. It has massive impacts on a retail business’s reputation, credibility, and visibility.
A warehouse solution equips retailers with better order fulfillment and decreased inaccuracies that, in turn, are crucial in nurturing meaningful relationships with the suppliers as well as the customers.
Apart from the above-mentioned advantages, WMSs enable a high level of transparency across the warehouse operational modules.
Enabled by automation, a WMS plays a crucial role in rehashing the paper-heavy transactions function. A WMS enables real-time information updates that, in turn, reduces paperwork substantially. Also, retailers can change their conventional methods of information retainment in physical forms as WMSs make it easy for the information to be stored digitally.
What Retailers Should Be Looking at While Choosing A Warehouse Management System?
If you are willing to take your retail business to the next step with the introduction of a WMS, here are the things you must consider.
- Identify the purposes the newly-leveraged WMS would serve for your retailing requirements. Do a cost-benefit analysis to maximize your ultimate business ROI.
- The WMS must be easy to use, navigate through and learn for your warehouse personnel. Needless to mention, it should deliver a consistent and seamless experience to your intended customers.
- While automation is paving its way into almost every industry vertical, be sure to check out the automation capabilities of the WMS you are planning to opt for. Look for a WMS that supports wireless technologies, promises real-time information update.
- The WMS should have good integration capabilities.
- Don’t forget to enquire about the system capacity and the technical support offered by third-party service providers.
So, no matter if you are a novice or a seasoned retailer, we have got you covered! For more information on warehouse management solutions, do get in touch with the experts at Vinculum, NOW!
