STORAGE OPTIMISATION FEATURE
control when only selling a few dozen items a week may not be able to manage so easily when volumes surge to hundreds a day. The Cheshire Cheese Company, for
example, doubled the number of staff to six at the beginning of its lockdown surge. Despite the team working 12-hour shifts across a seven-day week the company still needed to recruit a second shift to cope with demand. The company uses the built-in functions of its integrated e-commerce package to manage stock control across all its channels and this continued to work well during its peaks during spring 2020. For many businesses, however, the
limitations of paper-based processes or lack of support for standard warehouse processes in the applications they use leads them to consider more warehouse-focused stock solutions. These will offer core functions central to a business’s ability to maintain their operations, fulfil orders and meet customer expectations. But implemented correctly a WMS can interface with online marketplaces, customer ordering systems, carrier
management and accounting functions to create an integrated business solution delivering efficiency, accuracy and better oversight of the physical stock control function. The traditional response by a growing
business has been a WMS configured to their own unique business requirements, usually running on inhouse managed servers. These can ultimately be good solutions but take time to specify, configure and implement, typically with a large upfront cost. This is a less suitable option for a rapidly growing business where taking advantage of new opportunities quickly is key to sustained success. Businesses like this need a more immediate yet scalable solution, to help achieve quick wins in relation to handling higher workload. They also need one that can be easily adopted by new and existing personnel because time for in depth training is often limited. Because of this, progressive businesses
are turning to cloud-based WMS. The best of these offer a well-defined set of core features that cover most users’
requirements. That means they can be deployed with little or no additional configuration. Nor do they require the local infrastructure of conventional systems. In particular, there is no need to install, configure and “go live” a dedicated on-premises computer to host the application. Cloud-based solutions are highly
scalable and can generally be up and running more quickly than conventional systems. This can be useful when setting up temporary supply chains or new routes to market in response to rapidly changing demands, such as during the crisis. They have industry-standard API interfaces to integrate easily with existing business applications and the ability to import data simply from a range of sources. Solution providers generally charge monthly by user numbers of order volume, but are not usually subject to long term contracts, so costs only increase when justified by the business growth.
ProSKU
www.prosku.com T: 0800 1701161
IRISH MANUFACTURING | SEPTEMBER 2020 13
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