As we have discussed many times in the past, the apparel
industry is not all about fashion week and blogging about celebrities wearing trendy
t-shirts. There are tons of rather
boring aspects that play a critical role in the success or failure of clothing
companies. One such aspect is the
element of managing inventory. Designing,
producing, and selling garments is obviously very important. But finding the item in a massive warehouse
is equally as important. Regardless of whether
or not your company uses your own warehouse or if you use a third party
facility, it is important to make sure that the warehousing facility is using
an appropriate WHS (warehouse management system).
How do public warehouses that cater to the apparel
industry properly manage inventory? Many
warehouse develop their own internal systems.
However, it is also possible to purchase out of the box solutions.
A warehouse management system (WMS) is a key part
of the supply chain and primarily aims to control the movement and storage of
materials within a warehouse and process the associated transactions, including
shipping, receiving, putaway and picking. A WMS monitors the progress of products
through the warehouse. It involves the
physical warehouse infrastructure, tracking systems, and communication between
product stations. In other words, it
helps a company know what has arrived into a warehouse and where in the
warehouse the items can be found. It
also helps track what leaves the warehouse.
More precisely, warehouse management involves the receipt, storage and
movement of goods, (normally finished goods), to intermediate storage locations
or to a final customer.
Warehouse management
systems often utilize automatic identification and data capture technology,
such as barcode scanners, mobile computers, wireless LANs and potentially
radio-frequency identification (RFID) to efficiently monitor the flow of
products. Once data has been collected, there is either a batch synchronization
with, or a real-time wireless transmission to a central database. The database
can then provide useful reports about the status of goods in the warehouse.
Warehouse design and process design within the
warehouse (e.g. wave picking) is also part of warehouse management.
Warehouse management is an aspect of logistics and supply chain management.
Warehouse management systems can be standalone
systems, or supply chain execution suite, modules of an ERP system. Depending
on the size and sophistication of the organization, the system can be as simple
as a handwritten list that are updated when required, spreadsheets using
software such as Microsoft Excel or Access or purpose-built software programs. This
really depends on the size of your business.
You can find several resources on the web that list
top warehouse management system lists. Simply
search on Bing or Google, to look for the best of lists and you are sure to
find something. Here is an example that
you may find to be helpful.
If you find additional resources that are specifically
geared toward the fashion
industry, please share the links in the comment section below.
If you are happy with a particular software that
you currently use, please share your experience in the discussion area so we
can all learn from you.
By the way, we mentioned “wave picking” above, but
realize that not all fashionistas would know what that means. Here is a brief explanation if you are
interested: Wave picking is a term for a
process used in a warehouse management system to describe a process to support
managing the work of a warehouse or distribution center. Wave picking is an
application of short interval scheduling, to assign orders into groupings
(waves) and release them together so as to allow management to coordinate the
several parallel and sequential activities required to complete the work.
Thank you for taking the time to read our fashion warehouse technology blog post. We hope that you have found this news to be informative. If you have comments or questions, please add your thoughts in the discussion area below.