Five Problems Only Apparel Warehouse Managers Understand
When inventory and warehouse transactions lay the foundation of your business, you soon realize it’s not an easy game and a warehouse manager has to encounter challenges at every nook and corner during his day to day operations. Warehouse management in apparel sector is much more than simply arranging the inventory in a systematic manner. It’s more about optimizing inventory, recycling the dead stock, circulating the inventory as per seasonal change, and keeping the accurate stock count of each variant, colour, style, and size. Striking the right balance between efficient planning and core inventory managing skills is yet another challenge for the warehouse managers. They have to struggle in attaining stock flexibility and responsiveness to sales demands from any channel, while lowering inventory carrying costs. Let’s get to know more about such unique defies that only an apparel warehouse manager can correlate to:
1. Inventory accuracy: This is one of the biggest pain points that a warehouse manager of clothing range faces because they have to keep accurate stock count of every single design, pattern, and style along with their respective colour, size, and fabric. Initial counts, regular inventory counts or errors in everyday order picking can create significant discrepancies in the actual count as compared to on-hand inventory.
2. Stock Rotation Optimization: Apparel industry is subjected to rapid seasonal shift and once you miss the right time of stock rotation, the entire sale is lost resulting into bulk of dead stock. The warehouse managers have to closely monitor the right time to hit the store shelves so that they can optimize the benefits of stock rotation and build a long lasting brand image in the minds of customers.
3. Managing Multi-channel Sales: Being a part of the apparel industry, you just cannot afford to miss the option of multi-channel selling as it offers a wider platform to boost sales and bring in bulk orders for revenue generation. But, managing numerous channels for even more number of product variants is a tough task and demands brilliant management skills.
4. Warehouse Layout Design: Time is equivalent to money in the life of any warehouse manager. It’s his prime responsibility to design the layout such that every single item can be identified and located in fraction of seconds so that every shipment leaves the warehouse gates before the deadline and no delivery is unnecessarily delayed. The aisle arrangement and stock placement should be in a way that utilises maximum storage space with convenient space for the labour movement.
5. Labelling and Barcoding: Comes handy while tracing a faulty batch of clothes. The defect can be of any type, nature of fabric, type of designing or stitching mistakes. If the products are labelled clearly reflecting the codes for vendor and date of arrival, the traceability time can be reduced significantly. Moreover, the defected lot can be prevented from further circulation. Barcodes are the best ways to operate in bulk inventories as the entire data of any individual item can be obtained over a common data platform. Managing all this manually is just next to impossible for a warehouse manager.
That’s why ERP integrated with a WMS system is the right choice in the apparel industry!
While Warehouse Management Systems are automated tools used to manage the inventory by tracking products that move through your warehouse, from receiving to shipping and Enterprise Resource Planning differs from a WMS in terms of scope as it covers almost all the aspect of supply chain right from procurement of raw material to product delivery to the customer’s doorstep. WMS is a standalone system that takes care of only inventory part and requires integration with other business-critical operations, such as sales, purchase, production, finance, accounting and customer service. Hence, integration of your current WMS with more comprehensive ERP technology is always recommended to overcome the toughest challenges of warehouse management with complete ease.
One such unique solution is BatchMaster ERP for process manufacturers, which helps you run your entire business at peak efficiency, because it automates activities across all your departments including the warehouse. If you are one amongst the suffering lot of warehouse manager then join us to learn more about ERP and WMS integration by our subject matter experts.
BatchMaster is a vendor of end-to- end ERP solutions for process manufacturing industries such as Food, Beverage, Chemicals, Cosmetics, Foundry, Pharmaceutical and Nutraceuticals.