For modern distributors, technology can supportmany best practices to improve efficiency and accuracy in the areas of warehouse stocking, put-away, picking and counting. From reclassifying inventory locations and moving items for ease of fulfilling orders, to eliminating employee footsteps and improving timeliness of customer shipments, technology can bring value to your business and help reduce expenses. Most distributors would agree the critical areas where they would like to see improvement relate to accuracy of items and counts, and being able to process more transactions in the same amount of time. These are areas in which technology can help a distributor know what’s in their warehouse, where is it exactly and who is handling it or has handled it in the past. When it comes to handling inventory, it’s imperative to limit the human touches to as few as possible. The more times an item is handled and the more individuals involved in the handling, the more time and money are being wasted. In addition, every time a person touches inventory it creates a risk that something will happen to that stock. It is inevitable human interaction will bring about items getting misplaced, dropped, damaged, etc. Having one person at the receiving dock checking in purchase-order line items on a list, then sending the items to a second person for stock put-away, then possibly sending the list inside to the IT person for updating the computer system, simply is not efficient. This is where technology can have a positive impact on your processes. Inbound processing and utilizing technology, such as enterprise resource planning and/or warehouse management system software, can allow one individual to check in materials and record the inventory in a single step. Then, those inventory items can be routed to stocking locations or bins in the warehouse or […]