Over a decade after the DSCSA was passed to enhance patient safety and supply chain integrity, its full enforcement, including stringent electronic traceability requirements for pharmaceuticals, is set to begin on November 27, 2024 ..read more

Rents are rising, putting warehouse space at a premium. You simply can’t afford to be wasting your warehouse space with poor putaway and pick practices. This article will explain the fundamentals of an effective warehouse management system, including what a warehouse management system is, the benefits of using an optimized solution and touch on the associated costs of running a modern, digital warehouse management system ..read more

Warehouse Management Systems, or WMS, is a very mature well-known category of supply chain software. The first WMS  -  defined as inventory management using real-time mobile data collection terminals (i.e, RF) was first adopted in 1975., and now manages operations in thousands if not tens of thousands of distribution center worldwide ..read more

In the face of efulfillment and other pressures, companies are increasingly turning to “Put Wall” systems to reduce order picking costs and increase throughput.  What is a Put Wall? A Put Wall is a fulfillment system that uses a physical structure to create a series of “cubbie holes” or slots into which products for customers order are placed, or “put”, after picking, with each slot holding items for all or part of an individual customer order.   ..read more

One of the core concepts relative to Warehouse Management Systems is that of “directed putaway.” While many logistics professionals are very familiar with this topic, it is clear from conversations with many companies that others don’t really have all the details – and that quite a few lack directed putaway capabilities with whatever software system they are currently using to run their distribution center ..read more

Zoning is one of the fundamental concepts in Warehouse Management from both a software and operating perspective. In general, it involves grouping some set of individual storage locations of all types into defined zones that can be used by the WMS to improve operational effectiveness and precision ..read more

“Task Interleaving” is one of the core concepts of warehouse management systems. At a high level, it involves linking two or more tasks, most commonly for workers on lift trucks. For example, a full pallet putaway could be linked with a full pallet replenishment. With the rise of autonomous mobile robots, or AMRs, a new type of interleaving has emerged ..read more

The interest in software to manage warehouses and distribution centers remains strong, fueled by omnichannel fulfillment requirements, growing adoption of automation in the DC and other trends ..read more

Outside of few sectors such as grocery and food service, our perception is that the interest in full blown engineered labor standards in Distribution is waning a bit. Companies, it seems, are increasingly reluctant to invest in the initial development and especially the on-going maintenance of engineered standards as things change over time. But that hardly means companies aren’t interested in detailed labor reporting by individual, comparing performance against a standard, such as cases or units picked per hour. Quite the opposite ..read more

There is no question that Warehouse Management Systems – WMS – were late to the Cloud versus Transportation Management and other types of supply chain software, for a variety of reasons. Those included concerns that there would be issues with processes that require millisecond response times, such as communicating with material handling systems or even label printing. The good news: many of those concerns appear to be far overblown, especially if the WMS was architected to maximize Cloud response times. Lately, we’ve seen about two-thirds of new WMS implementations as cloud-based deployments ..read more