For ecommerce businesses, inventory management can be a daunting task. Keeping track of stock levels, managing multiple warehouses, and ensuring timely fulfillment can feel overwhelming. This is where a robust warehouse management system (WMS) comes into play. A powerful WMS can transform how you manage your inventory, streamlining processes, optimizing efficiency, and ultimately, boosting your bottom line.
Enter ShipHero WMS, a leading provider of outsourced fulfillment solutions designed specifically for ecommerce businesses. ShipHero offers a comprehensive platform that goes beyond simple inventory tracking, providing a holistic approach to fulfillment optimization. In this blog post, we’ll delve into the world of ShipHero WMS, exploring how it can unlock inventory efficiency for your ecommerce business.
Table of Contents:
- Introduction
- Setting Up Your Inventory for Success
- Receiving Inventory with ShipHero WMS
- Putting Away Inventory Effectively
- Advanced Inventory Management Features
- FAQ Section
- Conclusion
Introduction
For e-commerce businesses to thrive, efficient inventory management is non-negotiable. ShipHero WMS emerges as a comprehensive solution, effectively addressing the challenges of inventory tracking, order fulfillment, and overall operational efficiency. This guide explores the intricacies of ShipHero WMS, delving into its features and benefits for e-commerce businesses of all sizes.
Setting Up Your Inventory for Success
Getting started with ShipHero WMS requires a structured approach to ensure seamless integration with your existing systems and a smooth transition to an efficient inventory management workflow.
Connecting Sales Channels
One of the key features of ShipHero WMS is its ability to connect with various sales channels. This integration allows you to manage your entire inventory across multiple platforms in a centralized system, ensuring stock levels are consistently updated and accurate, eliminating the need to manually update each platform.
Creating Kits and Bundles
For businesses selling products in bundles or kits, ShipHero’s WMS streamlines this process. Instead of managing each individual item within a kit separately, you can group items together and define them as a kit. This simplifies stock management, order fulfillment, and reporting.
Barcodes for Efficient Tracking
Barcodes are essential for accurate and rapid inventory tracking. ShipHero’s WMS allows you to easily assign barcodes to your products. It can either automatically generate unique barcodes for your products or accommodate your existing barcode system, making the transition seamless.
Barcode scanning technology plays a crucial role in the ShipHero WMS, allowing for swift and accurate inventory updates. When items arrive at the warehouse, they’re scanned into the system, updating inventory levels instantly. The same process applies to picking orders, where barcodes are scanned to ensure the correct items are included in each shipment.
Defining Locations for Organization
To optimize warehouse space and streamline Shiphero inventory management, ShipHero enables you to define specific location types within your warehouse. By establishing distinct locations, ShipHero provides a clear visual representation of your inventory, enabling you to easily track the location of each item and quickly access needed products for fulfillment. This ensures organized storage, prevents unnecessary searching, and fosters a more efficient picking and packing process.
Receiving Inventory with ShipHero WMS
Once your Shiphero inventory is set up, the next step is receiving shipments into your warehouse. ShipHero’s WMS simplifies this process by providing a structured and efficient workflow.
Purchase Orders and Streamlined Receiving
The receiving process starts with a purchase order. This document provides essential details about the incoming shipment, including the products, quantities, and expected arrival date. ShipHero integrates with your purchase order system, automatically creating receiving records and ensuring that all relevant information is readily available.
This automation eliminates manual data entry, reducing the risk of errors and improving accuracy.
Scan-Based Receiving for Speed and Accuracy
ShipHero’s WMS leverages barcode scanning technology to expedite the receiving process. Instead of manually counting items, warehouse staff can simply scan the barcodes of each product as it arrives.
This approach ensures accuracy, eliminates potential counting errors, and significantly speeds up the receiving process.
Filling Bins and Ensuring Accuracy
As products are received and scanned, they are then placed into designated bins within the warehouse. Each bin is assigned a unique barcode, allowing ShipHero to track the specific products stored within it and their location.
When the bin is full, the bin’s barcode is scanned to complete the receiving process for that specific product. This comprehensive approach ensures accuracy at every step, preventing discrepancies and maintaining consistent inventory records.
Putting Away Inventory Effectively
Once you’ve received your inventory, you need to put it away in your warehouse efficiently. ShipHero’s WMS helps you streamline this process with features that enhance accuracy and speed.
Mobile App Integration
ShipHero’s mobile app empowers warehouse staff to easily put away inventory. Instead of relying on paper instructions or remembering bin locations, staff can use the app to scan barcodes and identify the correct bin for each product.
This mobile integration simplifies put-away operations, reduces errors, and speeds up the process.
Replenishment Optimization
ShipHero’s WMS goes beyond basic put-away functions, incorporating smart replenishment features. This system automatically monitors pickable locations (where orders are fulfilled) and ensures they have enough stock to meet anticipated demand.
This prevents stockouts and minimizes the need for manual replenishment, ensuring that your warehouse remains stocked and your fulfillment process runs smoothly.
Leveraging Bin Transfer for Flexibility
Imagine you need to adjust your warehouse layout, move items to a different location, or simply reorganize your stock. ShipHero’s WMS offers a bin transfer feature that facilitates these changes.
Instead of physically counting items and manually transferring them, you can simply scan the barcode of the bin you want to move and then scan the barcode of the new destination bin. ShipHero automatically updates your inventory records, ensuring that the transfer is reflected in your system.
This feature promotes flexibility, eliminates the need for manual counting, and ensures your inventory is organized in a way that optimizes efficiency.
Advanced Inventory Management Features
ShipHero WMS offers a wide range of advanced features designed to help ecommerce businesses achieve greater inventory efficiency.
Barcode Scanning for Efficiency
Barcode scanning is a cornerstone of ShipHero’s system, extending beyond receiving and put-away. It plays a critical role in streamlining various warehouse processes, such as cycle counting, order picking, receiving returns, conducting stock audits, and managing product transfers.
Cycle Counting for Continuous Accuracy
Regular cycle counting is crucial for maintaining accurate inventory records. ShipHero WMS provides tools that simplify the cycle counting process. Instead of manually counting inventory, warehouse staff can use barcode scanning to quickly verify stock levels. This reduces the time and effort required for cycle counting, allowing you to maintain accurate inventory data on an ongoing basis.
Automatic Reorder Points for Stock Replenishment
One of the most significant advantages of ShipHero WMS is its automatic reorder point functionality. This feature helps businesses avoid stockouts by automatically placing orders when inventory levels reach predetermined thresholds.
Think of it as a built-in reminder system for your most important products. ShipHero ensures that you always have enough stock on hand to fulfill orders, minimizing delays and preventing disruptions to your fulfillment process.
Bin Locations for Optimized Storage
We already discussed the benefits of using a bin location system in your warehouse. ShipHero’s bin location system plays a key role in inventory management by ensuring organized storage, easy retrieval of products, and optimization of storage space.
Multi-Location Inventory Management
ShipHero’s WMS makes it possible to manage inventory across multiple warehouses. This feature is particularly valuable for businesses with a growing product catalog or expanding operations.
Imagine you have warehouses in different regions of the country. ShipHero allows you to centrally manage inventory, seamlessly fulfilling orders from the nearest warehouse to minimize shipping times and optimize shipping costs. This allows you to expand your reach, improve customer service, and provide faster delivery times.
FAQ Section
- How does ShipHero’s WMS prevent overselling? ShipHero updates inventory levels in real-time across all sales channels, ensuring you never oversell and preventing orders from being placed for out-of-stock items.
- What are the benefits of using bin transfer within ShipHero? Bin transfer eliminates the need for manual counting, preventing errors and saving time. It also facilitates efficient stock management and optimization of storage space.
- Why is a mobile app useful for receiving and putting away inventory? ShipHero’s mobile app allows for real-time data capture and tracking, streamlining receiving and put-away processes, and reducing errors.
- What are some examples of advanced features offered by ShipHero WMS? ShipHero offers a range of advanced features, including barcode scanning, cycle counting, automatic reorder points, bin locations, and multi-location inventory management. These features help businesses achieve greater inventory accuracy, efficiency, and visibility.
Conclusion
ShipHero WMS provides a comprehensive and efficient solution for managing your ecommerce inventory. By streamlining processes, automating tasks, and offering advanced features, ShipHero empowers you to achieve greater inventory accuracy, efficiency, and visibility. This translates to reduced costs, faster shipping times, and improved customer satisfaction.