What Are the Benefits of Using Business Intelligence for Warehouse Management?
Since you have a business and one of your key tasks is warehouse management, you may be interested in streamlining this process. In this case, we recommend you take into account specialized business intelligence solutions for warehouse management. You will get centralized access to all your data, even in real-time mode, the ability to allocate employees load and minimize the risk of overstocking. In this article, we listed all reasons why you should integrate a BI system into your warehouse management workflow.
Logistics, warehousing, and inventory management processes have never been easy. There are many details to keep in mind while staying focused on fast delivery and good customer service. Fortunately, a smart warehouse management system (WMS) powered by business intelligence (BI) technologies can be quite helpful with these tasks. Let’s find out how business intelligence management solutions can improve and optimize your warehousing processes and do you need to build a custom BI system.
What is the Warehouse Management Process?
As the name implies, the process of managing your warehouse refers to activities like inventory management, logistics, customer service, staff training, planning, goal setting, and reporting. Sometimes warehouse management is mixed up with inventory management, but they are not the same.
What is the difference between inventory management and warehouse management? Inventory management is part of the warehouse management process, so inventory is part of a bigger concept.
Warehouse Success Metrics
Despite the fact that there are a lot of metrics that point to successful warehouse management, each business sets its own priorities. Below are the most important metrics that can be used to assess the effectiveness of your company’s warehouse inventory management.
- Inventory turnover is an indicator that shows how many times per year you have no inventory. The higher this indicator is, the better.
- Backorder rate. This indicator should be as small as possible. If you have a high backorder rate, it makes sense to use a big data and business intelligence solution to find the root cause.
- Inventory accuracy is an indicator that shows the relation between the number of goods you actually have and what your inventory says that you have, according to your warehouse management software. Inventory accuracy should be 100%, and this indicator is achievable with the help of a data warehousing and business intelligence solution.
- Order picking accuracy. This indicator shows the percentage of orders that were picked up and delivered without mistakes and issues.
- Demand forecast. This indicator is essential in times of uncertainty since it allows for a prediction of how much product you will sell taking real-time and historical data into account. Warehouse management systems powered by artificial intelligence (AI) is the only way to get this actionable insight.
- Supply chain cycle time. This is the period of time you need to fill your inventory when it is completely out of stock.
- Customer order cycle time. This is the time it takes from the customer’s order to its fulfillment.
What is Business Intelligence Management?
Keeping the warehouse success metrics at a high level would be especially difficult and challenging without business intelligence and performance management solutions. In a nutshell, these are BI tools that are aimed at data processing, visualizing, analyzing, reporting, and suggesting fixes with the ultimate goal of optimizing and improving the process of warehouse management. Thus, business intelligence management is the process of managing your warehouse using intelligence data and AI-driven WMS software.
Reasons to Use Bi for Your Warehouse Management
In addition to a better chance of achieving good Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), using business intelligence and analytics management solution in your data warehousing may bring the following benefits.
- Technological modernization. It might be difficult to believe, but there are still companies that manage their warehouse and inventory manually. They can face shortages, theft, product spoilage, and delays in shipments. Improving your data warehousing process with the help of a BI solution opens up quite a lot of technological opportunities related to data gathering, analysis, insight extraction, prediction, and optimization.
- Centralized access to all data. A data array makes no sense until it is classified and stored in a unified database. With business intelligence, data takes on new meaning because it is stored, classified, and analyzed in a single system, according to specific parameters.
- Access to real-time data analysis. Most of the success metrics we’ve listed would be easier to achieve if you employ data analysis opportunities which are an integral part of any business intelligence solution. For example, after analyzing recent orders, you may discover that a high backorder rate is due to shipment delays or customer expectations.
- More efficient allocation of employee time. Proper warehouse management makes the work of your employees more efficient since they always know or can easily find out where the desired product is, and how it should be packaged, picked up, and sent to the customer.
- Minimizing the risk of overstocking and running out of products. Data management and business intelligence solutions are often AI-driven. This advanced feature makes accurate supply-and-demand predictions possible so you can avoid overstock, and minimize the risk of being out of stock.
Conclusion
The process of managing and controlling your warehouse becomes easier and more effective with the help of business intelligence solutions. There are some ready-made tools you can get started with, however, keep in mind that they are developed for many different users and, in most cases, don’t always meet the needs of all businesses.
That’s why a BI solution that is developed from scratch for your warehouse management may be more effective and bring a greater return on investment (ROI).
