Inventory Management With Multiple Warehouses

Lean manufacturing occupies the records as the big bargain in the last ten years. Generally, lean manufacturing refers to software designed to reduce waste, enhance efficiency, and boost productivity by smoothening the paces you follow to fabricate products.

As a lean manufacturing strategy section, manufacturing can occur at several different facilities. As a result, you’ll have to quickly monitor your product’s position in each manufacturing process stage. Also, you can rely on inventory management software to make everything more manageable.

Less Risk

Generally, it’s a goal come true to have your overall manufacturing/inventory in a single place. Several things deserve consideration of easy access and managing the whole process from one place. But what if a warehouse fire breaks out? Or, what if someone robs your warehouse? Or, what if a flood occurs?

In these cases, expect a disastrous situation if you have your overall process in a single place. However, you can mitigate the risk if you have more or a secondary site. And if you avoid using several warehouses because you imagine the inventory management roles will be complex, that does not have to be the problem. The market has software solutions that will help you manage several locations with less hassle.

Lower Costs

Adding more warehouses can lower warehouse rent/mortgage, shipping, and labor costs. Also, expect to save more if you outsource to another nation. Besides this, you can save cash in terms of transportation expenses. However, don’t focus on adding the locations randomly – instead, focus on adding the sites strategically.

Multiple Warehouse Issues

Now that you know the benefits of multiple warehouse spaces let’s focus on the challenges you’re likely to face when managing these locations.

It’s not strange that multiple warehouses make everything more complicated than when monitoring your supplies/products from a single location. However, this should not discourage you from considering multiple warehouse spaces because the pros outweigh the cons. Below are a few challenges that come with numerous warehouse spaces:

Maintaining Stock Add Ups

More inventory means more challenges when tracking the supplies/products. Moreover, this difficult level can increase sharply if you place the inventory at several locations.

Bottlenecks

You increase the bottleneck’s potential if you store products in several stations. You’re likely to experience this because of miscommunication issues between the stations. However, this is an expensive issue that may significantly impact your bottom line and overall productivity.

Unequal Inventory Positions

With the several products, production materials, and manufacturing situated at various worksites, it’s easy to find yourself with unequal inventory measures – which brings about another bottleneck.

The logistics involving having the textiles kept at a single station and the manufacturing center at another place means you’ll need exceptional inventory management to ensure the correct quantity of fabric reaches the production center at the required time.

Order Problems

With ineffective inventory management software, you’ll quickly discover that the requested orders are mainly not filled at all or not more than once. The probability for this error jumps up every time you have several warehouse spaces.

Managing Inventory When You Have Multiple Warehouses

Involve Movable & Fixed Tracking

Having your investment focus on inventory management can save you much money and a lot of hassle. You need a fixed and movable type of tracking to develop pro inventory management software. This step is indispensable because merging ‘movable’ tracking and fixed monitoring options can help you know the product’s location, status, and products that you can fulfill, ship, and check if the tools required to facilitate the order are updated.

Generally, movable and fixed monitoring ensures you have a faster and hassle-free fulfillment process.

Fixed Monitoring

Asset monitoring or fixed monitoring entails consistent tracking of the manufacturing tools or the ones that make it easy to fulfill the fulfillment projects and warehouse tasks. You can use barcodes or RFID tags to monitor the system status or location.

Movable Monitoring

Movable monitoring or inventory management entails tracking each product, the products in your warehouse, the products that need restocking, and the excess products. Generally, ‘movable’ monitoring manages your current stock and its number in real-time.

Implement Cross-Docking & Wave Picking