Many brands use only one warehouse to manage all the inventory. It is very easy to manage one warehouse and you can easily check and balance all of your inventory. You can manage supply chain with just little effort and you can count all of your inventory. When your brand grows having one warehouse is not enough to meet demands of supply in this way you cannot achieve your targets. If you use one warehouse then shipping can delay your order completion. For this purpose you need multiple warehouse it will reduce transport cost and will help you to manage your deliveries, but it is not easy to manage inventory in multiple warehouses.
Challenges of multiple warehouses:
Multiple warehouses have a lot of advantages but in same way there are some difficulties which you can face but using warehouse management software it will become easy for you. If you divide your stock from one warehouse to multiple warehouses then you may face some frustrations of this strategy. Some biggest challenges which you may face are following:
Maintaining Stock counts:
It is easy to maintain stock of everything if you are using one warehouse but it is totally opposite when you have more than one warehouse. Stock level can fall easily and it can affect your sales and it can cause supply chain inefficiencies. In multiple warehouses low stock or low inventory count is a serious obstacle which may pose serious challenges.
Cross-Warehouse Communications:
If you have more than one ware house than it is not easy to manage both by the same workers. You may need more staff and companies usually face communication issues and it is not easy to tell about each thing of warehouse on call without face to face interaction. Hence it is serious issue which can lead to problems.
Mixing up files for different warehouses:
If you don’t use different files for each warehouse then there is a chance of mixing of important files because data is much similar in both warehouses so shipments and orders can be mixed. Separate file system is solution of this problem for this purpose you need separate file for each section like inflow, outflow and invoices.
Manage inventory across multiple warehouses:
Every problem has a solution. All of these inventory related problems can easily be solved if you are using right technology at right time. Use of technology is compulsory for advance works. To manage inventory on multiple location you can use inventory management software through which you can automate some manual functions and it is quite helpful.
If you are looking for right inventory management tool make sure it have following features;
- Keep an eye on stock levels across all locations
- Send products from one warehouse to another
- Sync with other important components of your business (like your Ecommerce back-end and/or accounting software)
- Build fulfillment workflows that scale
- Create purchase orders
- Run reports that offer transparency into your inventory and operations
Final words:
You can manage warehouses by some simple steps like make sure every shelve of your ware house is labelled and have appropriate product. Place popular products to exit so employees can send you order without taking much time. Try to create easy to read map for your large warehouse and post some copies in strategic location so new persons in warehouse can easily reach to its desired location.
