If your business involves manufacturing and warehousing capabilities, you understand just how many individual parts must align at the right time in the right place to meet your peak operational efficiency goals and keep your customers happy.
One missed product order, one late shipment, or one missed invoice and your business can slow or come to a complete halt. Warehouse management automation through business management software (BMS) can decrease the likelihood of these errors and give you full insight into all your operations at any point in time.
Unfortunately, for many small and medium size businesses, many critical operational functions are still handled by disparate systems and sometimes even paper manifests facilitated by memory, paper calendar reminders, manual phone orders, and spreadsheets that are hundreds — or even thousands — of cells deep. Who can keep up?
These disparate and patchworked systems may work some of the time, but they’re time-consuming and often don’t provide complete or instant insight into your overall operations.
A BMS platform with shipping and receiving tools can remove the frustration and headaches of processes that have been hodge-podged together over time.
aACE’s shipping and receiving tools enable manufacturing and warehouse operators to improve efficiencies by managing all of their core operations in a single cross-platform solution. You can quickly get real-time insight into all of your inventory, fulfill orders, receive payments, and get alerts about all your processes from a single, easy-to-use solution.
Here are 5 ways aACE can help you streamline and automate tasks within your warehouse management system to improve operational efficiencies:
1. Inventory Management
If you’re still using manual processes for your manufacturing and warehousing operations, this might look familiar to you. A team member notices you’re running low on a product or supply. The employee logs in online or places a call for a reorder. You always get a specific number of that product and generally have a good idea of how long that will last you. The order is made and then sometime later a truck pulls up to your warehouse loaded with boxes of products or supplies.
When that shipment comes in, an employee receives the order. That employee may or may not know you’re expecting a delivery. Nonetheless, the driver and your employee exchange paperwork. The boxes are unloaded, and team members get busy counting and accounting for the shipment. Numbers and information are written down or put into a spreadsheet. Those boxes are then routed to another location in your facility where they’re stored until needed.
But what if the order was over-estimated and you have no room for all the extra goods that just came in? Or what if the employee who placed the order didn’t realize your team recently relocated that product to another section of your warehouse and you weren’t actually running low at all?
Now you have twice the product on the floor than you actually need and processes are slowed while everyone works together to try to figure out where to store the excess and how to manage the possible expenditure misstep.
This process is inefficient, tedious, and time-consuming. What if you could free up your employees resources here so their time could be put to use for more valuable tasks?
aACE’s built-in inventory management software (IMS) can speed up these processes with streamlined steps and automation, while supporting you with better insight and tracking.
For example, IMS gives you constant insight into your inventory. You can forecast inventory requirements based on your existing business processes and orders. It knows just how much inventory you need and when, and can help you save money with freight management tools.
2. Automated Shipments and Product Selection
Your warehouses are busy places. You have inventory constantly on the move. From supplies and products coming in to orders going out, if you’re using manual processes to track everything, it’s a juggling act — and it’s easy to drop the ball.
Automated shipping records will help your team always know which shipments are coming in and going out so no one is caught off guard.
You can even use aACE’s Pick App with barcode scanning to make sure that every product selected is the right one, every time.
3. eCommerce, Order Management, and Shipping
Product demand drives your inventory processes, so while you’re streamlining efficiencies within your warehouse, you can also streamline and automate many of your sales order processes.
An order management tool can help your team take orders from start to finish — while giving everyone complete insight into what’s happening without having to duplicate order entries in multiple places throughout your business.
aACE’s order management engine automates order entries, including full integrations with the industry’s most popular eCommerce tools. Your team members can easily take payments with point-of-sale payment processing and can even automate payments based on system events like when a deposit is needed, when goods are shipped, or other specifications tailored to your business processes.
The order management system can even automatically handle sales and use tax calculations, as well as credit management tools, and auto-generated purchase orders and invoices that are integrated with your regular accounting processes.
If a payment fails, aACE’s notification system will alert you via email and/or text messages before a product leaves your building — so you can easily follow-up and confirm payment before your shipment heads out the door.
And stop wasting time calling for couriers or waiting for an outgoing shipment pickup. With integrated NRG and ReadyShipper, you can streamline your packing and shipping processes, including support for major carriers like FedEx, USPS, UPS, and other LTL carriers.
4. Tracking and Statements
Remember that scenario we shared earlier with the tedious inventory management and manual supply tracking? Shipping and receiving software can eliminate some of that strain. With purchase order next-step tracking, you will always be aware of which supplies your team ordered and when those products will arrive. This means your team is always ready to receive new shipments.
Your purchasing and production team members can even receive instant notifications to let them know when incoming shipments have been received. That way they can speed up inspections, adjust for returns, and request re-shipments as needed. No more paper manifests and drowning in spreadsheets or repeating manual data entry across multiple work groups.
5. Calendar and Scheduling
The most efficient warehouse and manufacturing operations have comprehensive insight into all of the moving components of their operations.
Calendar and scheduling tools integrated into your business management software can help you get instant insight into everything happening across your operations. From leads, to purchase orders, to shipments and inventories, you can see calendar displays with all important related dates.
Best yet, those calendar events are linked to corresponding records, meaning you can drill down into more details with a single click within the calendar view, including insight into past events.
If your calendar is full, and we hope it is, you can filter your views by customer, job, teams, and resources — whatever you need to get a better picture of the important events that affect your operations. You can even color-code the events so you can easily see which events need immediate action and which are good to go.
The aACE+ DayBack calendar is also great for project management because you can switch to a Gantt-style view to see related events up to nine weeks out. And with drag-and-drop rescheduling, it’s easy to move things around to reschedule with related records.
Save Time, Money, and Resources with BSM
aACE clients say business management software saves them hundreds of hours of labor every month and the software is a critical to business success, including growth in annual revenue and more insight into business operational efficiencies.
Put down the paper and stop wasting time with tedious manual process. Register for an aACE webinar today to learn more about how its software can help you streamline your warehouse and manufacturing processes so you can focus more on tasks that improve customer service and add to your bottom line.
“I can say that using aACE actually helped us learn how to do business more professionally.” – Jim Parker, President and Owner, Vacutherm Inc.
