The introduction of technology into the warehouse and inventory management parts of a business can have real and meaningful results. Understanding what those technologies are and their potential impact is key to taking well informed decisions. At Akatia we believe that sharing these insights is beneficial for business stakeholders, especially as for many this may be the first time that they are considering changing the way they do things, or else perhaps they may not have known about the possibilities available. Either way it’s ok. Many businesses that we engage with are coming from a similar position. What we ultimately try to do is leverage our own experience and knowledge so that those possibilities become evident.
Over the last little while we’ve spoken about technology and principles that warehouse/inventory management operations can benefit from, specifically: process automation, mobile scanning, and dashboard reports. What’s interesting about these three technologies is that they all have an immediate impact, have a high return on investment and increase efficiency. What’s more is that WAM, Akatia’s WMS solution for Salesforce, has all these feature sets and are readily available to be leveraged by businesses.
In our experience many of the warehouse operations we have helped are coming from a paper and manual process background. We’re talking everything from manual entries of receipts, orders, shipments, and creation of documents. WAM can eliminate much of those time consuming, and sometime error prone processes. In WAM, receipts, shipments and orders are set up to happen when the system triggers a particular action. Once these are triggered other processes can be triggered, for example requisite document creation.
Mobile scanning was and has always been a key feature for us. Whereas many WMS solutions required third party tools to integrate we realized that creating our own app would be hugely beneficial. Our WAM customers have the ability to introduce a scanner app that interacts live with their Salesforce environment. The warehouse ops become effectively mobile. This saves huge amounts of time and effort as well as improving accuracy. On top of this mobile scanning also relates directly to automation, as triggers can be put in place, say for example once an order is completed labels are printed automatically.
Lastly reporting is a major aspect of any warehousing operation. Without the ability to report on KPI’s a business is almost running blind. Data is one of the biggest assets a business has. Putting it to work and gaining insights is how we know what we’re doing right, where an action needs to take place and where improvement may be needed. WAM has dashboard tools available for businesses so that they can make their data visually engaging, all at a glance in one environment, Salesforce. Reports can even be configured to suggest actions, like re-order thresholds.
Knowing the tools and technology that are available is core to transforming a business and setting itself up for immediate and long-term success. WAM provides these tools in a one environment solution that is completely configurable to a business’ specific needs. We’ve identified the core challenges of the warehouse and continue to leverage the right technological solutions that will most impact our customer’s businesses. Our aim is to modernize the space and help businesses chart the right path forward.