Managers’ Guide to Warehouse Inventory Management System and Best Practices

If your business manufactures and/or distributes physical products in Singapore, it would inevitably need warehouse space where your inventory is stored and prepared for order fulfilment.

And to ensure that the stock in your warehouse space has been properly received, tracked, audited, and managed accordingly, you need to have robust warehouse inventory management processes.

Without such robust processes, finding where your products are stored within your warehouse will be difficult. You might even encounter problems retrieving what you need to fulfil a customer order.

As such, warehouse inventory management is a very important aspect of your business operations, and it’s crucial that you optimise this process where possible.

AFON IT has put together a set of best practices that your business can adopt to optimise your warehouse inventory management processes and system and guarantee your customers a perfect order fulfilment rate.

We hope this will serve you as a guide that’ll help you make your warehousing much more efficient than before, and enable your business to serve your customers that much better.

Not quite. It’s actually a subset of inventory management as a whole, which monitors the inventory of your products from the point of acquisition to the point of sale.

Specifically, warehouse inventory management involves tracking your products that are currently stored in your warehouse spaces, instead of those located in your storefronts or being used in your manufacturing processes.

It also includes procedures for replenishing your stock when inventory levels hit predetermined minimum quantities. This ensures that your available stock is at optimal levels based on historical sales data recorded by your business.

More importantly, warehouse inventory management is also concerned with where your products are located within your warehouse space. It aims to set up your warehouse so your employees can quickly pick, pack and ship items from your inventory.

This is done by storing items in predictable locations within your warehouse space. When a sale is made or a transfer order comes in, the items will be tracked as they’re moved out the warehouse door through to final delivery.

To do this effectively, you need the right system and practices for your warehouse operations. The following are the five best practices for managing your Singapore warehouse’s inventory.

The first step to running an efficient warehouse in Singapore is appointing a warehouse manager who will directly supervise the warehouse inventory system and operations.

The warehouse manager should be capable of monitoring your workers in their day-to-day work and ensuring that every item in your inventory system is scanned and properly catalogued.

They should also use any warehouse management system (WMS) you have implemented to gain full visibility into your warehouse inventory. This enables them to make better decisions regarding your warehouse operations.

If any issues crop up and are subsequently identified by your warehouse employees, your warehouse manager should also have the skills and responsibility to initiate a response to resolve the problem.

Another best practice you should consider when managing your warehouse in Singapore is planning the physical layout to best facilitate your warehouse operations.

With an optimal layout, your warehouse employees will find it much easier to quickly pick, pack and ship items out whenever you need to fulfil an order or move inventory for any reason.

Because of this, you’ll want to consider how your warehouse employees will move throughout your warehouse during their work when designing the layout of your warehouse space and work system.

That said, a good rule of thumb is to store your most popular items closest to where your packing station is in your warehouse to facilitate inventory picking best.

Because your products might fluctuate in demand levels, you should also reassess where each of these products should be stored within your Singapore warehouse regularly. This will ensure that your warehouse inventory system and operations remain efficient, even as the demand levels for each product change over time.

If possible, arrange your warehouse layout to allow for cross-docking or moving items directly from your warehouse receiving dock to the shipping dock without first placing them on your shelves. This can be especially useful for increasing the order fulfilment speed when you need to process a large volume of orders or have backorders to clear.

Overview of warehouse process flow; Source: BlueCart

Suppose you have appointed a warehouse manager to take charge and have arranged your warehouse layout to facilitate efficient warehouse operations. The next thing you’d need to put in place is a proper inventory management workflow.

The warehouse manager you appointed should have some experience with establishing warehouse workflows, so it’s a good idea to work with them to come up with a system that best fits your business needs.

When designing your inventory management workflow, you’d need to keep several key points in mind:

• How will you receive new inventory?
• When it’s received, where does the new inventory go?
• How is inventory tracked when it arrives, is moved, and leaves the warehouse in Singapore?

On top of that, there are other concerns with warehouse operations you should think about. These include the following;

1) Receiving Inventory

The most basic process of warehouse inventory management involves scheduling dock time for incoming items and arranging to have these items unloaded and placed on your warehouse shelves.

How quickly your shipments can move from dock to stock directly affects how soon your inventory is available for fulfilling customer orders. Thus, you need to ensure the speed with which your warehouse system in Singapore receives incoming inventory is as optimised as possible.

2) Inventory Location Tracking

Location tracking is key to inventory control, as it helps you know precisely where a product is in your Singapore warehouse when it’s time for your employees to pick it up for an order.

You’d want to consider whether your Singapore warehouse will need serial tracking, lot tracking, or a mix. The first tracking system works best for high-value items typically sold in low volumes, while the second type is better for low-value items usually sold in high quantities.

3) Picking, Packing and Shipping

When it comes time to fulfil an incoming sales order from your customers, reducing order lead time is crucial for increasing customer satisfaction. Thus, you must ensure that your warehouse employees in Singapore can pick, pack, and ship the correct items quickly and accurately according to the order.

With the most optimal warehouse inventory management system and practices, you can reduce your order lead times by days.

4) Cycle Counts and Regular Inventory Audits

It’s important to perform regular cycle counts to ensure loss prevention and inventory control. Without them, the items in your Singapore warehouse could be lost or stolen, and you might not recognise them as missing from your inventory system until it’s too late.

Regular cycle counts are especially important for items that expire, as well as your highest-value and bestselling items.

5) Accounting Methods

Your choice of accounting method is also important for managing your warehouse. This is because most warehouse inventory management software integrates with your accounting or ERP software to eliminate duplicate data and human error.

Depending on your warehouse operations in Singapore, you might want to use first-in first-out (FIFO), last-in first-out (LIFO), or average costing methods.

6) Data Reporting

Lastly, you’ll want warehouse inventory management software that can help you generate and distribute reports. These should include information like product quantities, sales data, requisition data from vendors, and information about lost or expired products.

These reports can help you gain full visibility into your Singapore warehouse’s inventory and allow you to make data-driven decisions when it comes to warehouse management.

You may have noticed that some of the previous best practices include implementing warehouse inventory management software to facilitate them. This is not a coincidence.

Warehouse inventory management software can be a vital asset to your business. This is because it automates inventory tracking within your Singapore warehouse as new items are received or picked to fulfil incoming orders.

This is especially true if your warehouse handles dozens, or even hundreds of stock-keeping units (SKUs). Tracking stock levels of each SKU and determining when reorders are necessary through a manual method such as spreadsheets takes up too much time to be practical.

With warehouse inventory management software, you can easily automate and simplify many tasks involved in warehouse inventory management. This ensures you have full visibility into your existing stock levels in real time.

That’s because as long as your warehouse employees follow proper procedure when scanning and cataloguing items as they are received and moved through your warehouse, your warehouse inventory management software will reflect not just your existing stock levels but also where it’s specifically located within your warehouse.

You can also set up your solution to automatically reorder more stock when your existing stock levels reach a predetermined minimum quantity. This ensures you won’t encounter a stock-out situation and lose potential sales because you don’t have enough inventory to meet the demand.

We mentioned earlier that implementing a warehouse inventory management software is one of the best practices you should consider for your business. But why?

It’s because they come with several key features that automate and greatly simplify inventory tracking and control within your warehouse, making managing your warehouse that much easier.

Warehouse inventory management software also typically comes with alerts and notifications functionalities which optimise your warehouse operations in Singapore. For example, it can keep track of the time that has passed since the last cycle count and send you an alert when it’s time to perform the next one.

In this way, these solutions can also serve as forecasting tools for your inventory management processes in general. For example, with the historical sales data from warehouse inventory management software, you can get insights to anticipate when to replenish your stock based on expected customer demand.

While some warehouse inventory management software are stand-alone systems, others are designed to integrate with enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. If your business currently manages its finances with ERP software, you could also integrate with one that works with that ERP software as an add-on. This enables you to manage your finances and inventory from a single platform.

Using Tasklet Factory Mobile WMS for your business; Source: Tasklet Factory

Suppose your business uses Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central to manage its finances and is looking for a solution to manage its warehouse operations and inventory system. In this case, we wholeheartedly recommend Mobile WMS from Tasklet Factory.

A mobile barcode scanning solution designed to integrate and work with Business Central, Mobile WMS offers key functionalities to optimise your warehouse management processes.

Thanks to its graphical user interface (GUI), Mobile WMS is easy to use and almost fully customisable to best fit the individual needs of your warehouse employees, who would be the end users of the solution.

Here are some of the following features that Mobile WMS bring to the table for businesses in Singapore:

• Offline Functionality: Mobile WMS can be used even without an Internet connection and will update your central database with the latest inventory count once the connection is restored.
• Fully Integrated With Business Central: Mobile WMS is designed to be 100% integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, making it an easy choice for customers of the cloud ERP software.
• Quick Installation: A true turnkey solution, Mobile WMS can be installed, set up and made operational for your end users in a couple of days.
• Built For Customisation: Mobile WMS is designed to be easily extended with customised functionality via Business Central to fit your warehouse inventory management needs better.
• User Friendly: Mobile WMS is designed to minimise the number of ‘clicks’ needed to operate the solution, and cut down on irrelevant information. This means you’ll only need minimal time to train your warehouse employees to use Mobile WMS effectively.

Managing the inventory in your warehouse is a key part of the overall inventory management needs your business might have and needs to be handled differently to ensure the full efficacy of the process.

To ensure that your warehouse is set up to receive inventory and fulfil customer orders with the utmost efficiency, you’ll need to put a proven system and best practices in place.

One of the most important of these best practices is implementing warehouse inventory management software in your business to automate and easily optimise your warehouse inventory management processes.

Find one that integrates with your business’s ERP software, such as Tasklet Factory’s Mobile WMS for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. This will make warehouse inventory management much easier for you as well.

We hope that you’ve found our guide to best practices for managing your warehouse inventory useful. If your business in Singapore is using Business Central and you’re interested in finding out how Mobile WMS can benefit your warehouse management, do drop us an enquiry here. Our consultants will get back to you shortly.