Warehouse Management: AIMS AND OVERVIEW: Businesses today must understand that they are competing on the basis of time more than on any other factor. The rigors of supply chain management require that you take action to meet your customers‟ demand for faster, more frequent and more reliable deliveries. Suppliers need to meet increasingly precise inbound schedules. Tomorrow‟s customers are more likely to be in another country or continent than they are likely to be from across town, in another state, or in another province. Warehouse management can be seen as a specialism within the wider context of Supply chain Management which engulfs (logistics, transport and management of Inventory). Managers are continually trying to balance increasing customer satisfaction with reducing inventory levels and costs. The warehouse has always been seen as an expensive cost center however it is fundamental to achieving the perfect order. Very few companies are in a position to implement successful Just In Time / Lean concepts of Inventory control and as such the storage of products becomes inevitable. The fundamental aspect is to ensure that the minimum amount of stock is held to satisfy the majority of demand at an acceptable cost. This result in a number of trades-offs within the warehouse which must be balanced to ensure maximum efficiency. Technology continues to advance in this area with sophisticated software and hardware products being introduced into the market. Warehouse automation is increasing in popularity along with both voice and robotics technologies.
Warehouse Management is likely to include exposure to other areas, such as transport management and administration. Warehouse managers oversee the handling and storage of a company's supplies and goods as well as track supply requests and forecast future material needs. Focusing on certain areas within the supply chain can reduce costs. There might be times when buying in bulk is cost effective. JIT, FIFO and LIFO will be discussed in the following Inventory Management. The present business / industry requirements for high levels of customer service together with increasing numbers and proliferation of SKUs and high labor costs have dramatically increased the complexity of warehouse operations. It is no longer sufficient to manage a warehouse based on a simple, arbitrary “ABC” classification of SKUs, which treats all those in a category as if they were identical. Instead, each decision – such as where to store or where to pick product – must be based on careful engineering and economic analysis. Each SKU must identify its own cheapest, fastest path through the warehouse to the customer, and then compete with all the other SKUs for the necessary resources. This results in warehouse operations that are finely tuned to patterns of customer orders, and so maximally efficient. Learn the concepts necessary to address modern warehouse trade-offs between space and time in optimizing and managing your warehouse. The need to analyze the following fundamental aspects of the supply chain, the course delivers in-depth knowledge of:
The Warehouse and its role within the supply chain The Operations undertaken within warehouses The Management of inventory within the supply chain The People aspect of warehouse management including resource planning
During the class, you will have the chance to develop your own action plan so you can put the seminar to work for you right away. Furthermore, you will soon see how the time-tested techniques from
