• Advertise
  • Contact Us
  • About Us
  • Supplier Directory
  • SCB YouTube
  • Login
  • Subscribe
  • Logout
  • My Profile

  • CORONAVIRUS
  • LOGISTICS
    • Air Cargo
    • All Logistics
    • Express/Small Shipments
    • Facility Location Planning
    • Freight Forwarding/Customs Brokerage
    • Global Gateways
    • Global Logistics
    • Last Mile Delivery
    • Logistics Outsourcing
    • LTL/Truckload Services
    • Ocean Transportation
    • Rail & Intermodal
    • Reverse Logistics
    • Service Parts Management
    • Transportation & Distribution
  • TECHNOLOGY
    • All Technology
    • Artificial Intelligence
    • Cloud & On-Demand Systems
    • Data Management (Big Data/IoT/Blockchain)
    • ERP & Enterprise Systems
    • Forecasting & Demand Planning
    • Global Trade Management
    • Inventory Planning/ Optimization
    • Product Lifecycle Management
    • Sales & Operations Planning
    • SC Finance & Revenue Management
    • SC Planning & Optimization
    • Sourcing/Procurement/SRM
    • Supply Chain Visibility
    • Transportation Management
  • GENERAL SCM
    • Business Strategy Alignment
    • Education & Professional Development
    • Global Supply Chain Management
    • Global Trade & Economics
    • HR & Labor Management
    • Quality & Metrics
    • Regulation & Compliance
    • SC Security & Risk Mgmt
    • Supply Chains in Crisis
    • Sustainability & Corporate Social Responsibility
  • WAREHOUSING
    • All Warehouse Services
    • Conveyors & Sortation
    • Lift Trucks & AGVs
    • Order Fulfillment
    • Packaging
    • RFID, Barcode, Mobility & Voice
    • Robotics
    • Warehouse Management Systems
  • INDUSTRIES
    • Aerospace & Defense
    • Apparel
    • Automotive
    • Chemicals & Energy
    • Consumer Packaged Goods
    • E-Commerce/Omni-Channel
    • Food & Beverage
    • Healthcare
    • High-Tech/Electronics
    • Industrial Manufacturing
    • Pharmaceutical/Biotech
    • Retail
  • REGIONS
    • Asia Pacific
    • Canada
    • China
    • Europe
    • Latin America
    • Middle East/Africa
    • North America
  • THINK TANK
  • WEBINARS
    • On-Demand Webinars
    • Upcoming Webinars
  • PODCASTS
  • VIDEOS
  • WHITEPAPERS
Home » Real-Time Warehouse Orchestration Improves Order-Fulfillment Times

Real-Time Warehouse Orchestration Improves Order-Fulfillment Times

February 8, 2022
Keith Moore, SupplyChainBrain Contributor
The warehouse management system (WMS) market is mature, but these applications need added functionality to keep up with growing customer demand, transportation capacity issues and labor shortages. Current WMS software is insufficient for optimizing processes, such as balancing inventory, labor and space, that will lead to meeting customer requirements for on-time, in-full deliveries. Warehouse resource planning and scheduling needs to be used with the WMS to optimize and orchestrate activities within warehouse operations.

Warehousing has lagged other business areas in adopting advanced decision support capabilities, but this is no longer acceptable or sustainable. Warehouses now need more sophisticated tools to deal with the complexities of the modern supply chain.

Modern-day warehouses are complex due to additional constraints from labor shortages, lack of warehouse space and increased order volume. This new level of complexity drives the need to add sophisticated planning and scheduling tools to address constraint-based issues within the warehouse.

Today’s WMS applications remain functionally siloed and fail to optimize end-to-end processes. At most sites, to get around these siloed shortcomings, there are numerous manual “spreadsheet” steps, tribal knowledge processes, or python scripts developed to extend existing capabilities and enable operators to do their jobs effectively.

To provide the value that executives are looking for without the traditional cost of WMS upgrades or projects, a new category of “WMS accelerator” software is emerging. WMS accelerators exist to look across all the fragmented operations at a distribution center (or campus of distribution centers) and optimize labor, touches, and inventory to drive efficiency.

WMS accelerators pull in data from warehouse management, yard management, order management, visibility and production systems to provide a single, unified view of operations. They then take all that data and apply digital twin technology to predict what will happen. This technology takes in the current state from all systems and shipment and order information, and plays the future forward based on known constraints such as labor, inventory and task times.

Playing forward warehouse operations identifies process bottlenecks but doesn’t resolve them. To do that effectively, WMS accelerators create a prescriptive plan to ensure that demand is met while respecting all the existing constraints inside the building, taking into account labor availability, inventory availability, task sequences and more. This process creates optimal schedules for everybody involved in the operation.

These solutions adapt and rebalance activities based on what actually happens inside of a warehouse in near-real time. It’s important to balance labor with what needs to be done to fill orders on time. Big distribution centers have hundreds of inbounds and outbounds each day. Managing all these activities can’t be done on paper or in the WMS.

Practically speaking, WMS accelerators rearrange picking schedules, change dock times (while still meeting the carrier pick-up time), create transfers, schedule just-in-time replenishments and much more, to ensure that all shipments are made without inventory cuts. A WMS accelerator enables all crews to work off of one single playbook, with much of the scheduling adaptive to changes and, most importantly, automated.

Outlook:

WMS accelerator technology is revolutionizing how warehouse operations are run, while simultaneously pulling the warehouse software landscape out of the dark ages and into the 21st century. With implementation times on the scale of weeks to months, WMS accelerators are quickly becoming a household name for consumer goods, grocery and direct-to-customer organizations.

Keith Moore is chief product officer with AutoScheduler.AI.

RELATED CONTENT

RELATED VIDEOS

Warehouse Management Systems
  • Related Articles

    How Smart Warehouse Orchestration Helps Sustainability Efforts

  • Related Directories

    SnapFulfil

Keith Moore, SupplyChainBrain Contributor

How Smart Warehouse Orchestration Helps Sustainability Efforts

More from this author

Wake up to live
“Supply Chains in Crisis”
updates and the latest Supply Chain News!

Subscribe to our Daily Newsletter

Timely, incisive articles delivered directly to your inbox.

Popular Stories

  • Warehouse worker

    Why Higher Wages Alone Won’t Solve the Supply Chain Labor Shortage

    Warehousing
  • Medical drone

    Amazon May Be Proof That Delivery Drones Aren’t Practical

    Last Mile Delivery
  • Adidas

    From Sneakers to Teslas, China Lockdowns Upend Global Supply Chains

    Coronavirus
  • Mobile App

    Podcast | Companies Are on a Shopping Spree for Supply Chain Software

    Technology
  • ESG Guide

    Confronting the ESG Imperative in Supply Chains

Digital Edition

Scb may 2022 sm

2022 Supply Chain ESG Guide

VIEW THE LATEST ISSUE

Case Studies

  • 3PL Doubles Productivity With Robots to Fulfill Medical Supply Orders

  • E-Commerce Company Cuts Order Fulfillment Time by 40%

  • Fashion Retailer Halves Fulfillment Time With Omichannel Automation

  • Distributor Scales Business by Integrating Warehouse Automaton Software

  • Fast-Growing Fashion Brand Scales E-Commerce Fulfillment With Whiplash

Visit Our Sponsors

Yang Ming Alithya Barcoding
Blue Yonder BNSF Logistics Generix
GEP GIB USA GreyOrange
Here Honeywell Intelligrated Inmar
Keelvar Kinaxis Korber
Liberty SBF Locus Robotics Lucas Systems
Nvidia Old Dominion Parsyl
Redwood Logistics Saddle Creek Logistics Schneider Dedicated
Setlog Holding AG Ship4WD Shipwell
Tecsys TGW Systems Thomson Reuters
Tive Trailer Bridge Vecna Robotics
Whiplash    
  • More From SCB
    • Featured Content
    • Video Library
    • Think Tank Blog
    • SupplyChainBrain Podcast
    • Whitepapers
    • On-Demand Webinars
    • Upcoming Webinars
  • Digital Offerings
    • Digital Issue
    • Subscribe
    • Manage Your Subscription
    • Newsletters
  • Resources
    • Events Calendar
    • SCB's Great Supply Chain Partners
    • Supplier Directory
    • Case Study Showcase
    • Supply Chain Innovation Awards
    • 100 Great Partners Form
  • SCB Corporate
    • Advertise on SCB.COM
    • About Us
    • Privacy Policy
    • Contact Us
    • Data Sharing Opt-Out

All content copyright ©2022 Keller International Publishing Corp All rights reserved. No reproduction, transmission or display is permitted without the written permissions of Keller International Publishing Corp

Design, CMS, Hosting & Web Development :: ePublishing