Warehouse Management Strategies to Meet the Festive Season Demand
The festive season is the time of celebration in India as people usually buy lots of goods during these days and in the process lifts businesses. When people buy goods from businesses, they expect their products to reach on time via cost-effective delivery services in Delhi, Noida, Ghaziabad, Mumbai, Bangalore or any other location they may be there. The surge in people’s excitement and energy during these periods puts huge pressure on warehouse management professionals to optimise their operations in order to meet customers’ expectations. Warehouse management involves storing and maintaining goods to ensure their smooth deliveries to the end users. Ensuring the same relies on a reliable warehouse workforce who can manage picking, storing, loading, material handling, and much more. In this blog, we will explore warehouse management strategies that help meet the demands of customers during the festive season.
What is Warehouse Management?
Warehouse management is the process of controlling the receipt, materials’ storage, movement inside the warehouse, and their delivery to customers. In addition, it ensures material handling, order fulfilment, and inventory control.
Furthermore, warehouse management is an important link in the supply chain as it helps the inflow and outflow of products. Ensuring a smooth flow of products from the manufacturing unit to the warehouse before delivering the same to the end users makes your warehouse management successful. The safe and secure handling of materials in the warehouse as well as tracking and controlling the storage of goods also come in the same category. Additionally, warehouse management includes tracking, measuring and maintaining optimum inventory levels, besides ensuring lower inventory costs.
Strategies That Help Warehouse Executives Meet Festive Season Demands
In the digital business era, the festive season means increasing the demand of products from customers. So, warehouse management professionals need to plan in advance to meet these demands. Otherwise, they will face several difficulties in inventory management, labour shortages, and delayed fulfilment. All of these would be enough for customers’ pathetic experience and degrading business reputation. The following are some warehouse management strategies that can help ensure efficient deliveries during the festive season.
Inventory Management
When businesses face stockouts, they often find it difficult to scale up their inventory management skills. At that time, a large amount of unsold inventory piles up in warehouses as well as disparities occurred in supply and demand for their products, etc.
During the festive season every year, implementing a strong inventory management system can lead to better visibility throughout supply chains and better inventory management, which involves maximising warehouse fulfilment operations, cutting costs, keeping stocks, preventing product spoilage, forecasting market demand, preventing theft, and ensuring many other benefits.
With an advanced inventory management system, warehouse managers may receive real-time, granular SKU visibility, which can inform them about slow-moving and deadstock products. Dynamic inventory optimisation provides you with in-depth knowledge of the stock level to avoid understocking or overstocking goods while utilising the warehouse space effectively.
Furthermore, it helps you receive a comprehensive SKU audit trail from receipt to dispatch with minimal human intervention, which is great for the peak festive season.
Implementation of Automation
Automation software offers real-time data, and 24*7 visibility into warehouse operations, minimises missed picks, ensures automatic replenishment, reduces returns, enhances responsiveness, and maximises warehouse associates’ productivity, all of which contribute to a more effective warehouse planning during peak seasons.
Retailers can increase dependability, lower risks, and create value with the use of automation capabilities throughout the complex network of fulfilment nodes. To work seamlessly with each other, warehouse managers need to utilise a digital fulfilment system that emphasises on hardware and software automation features.
Hardware automation helps reduce the difficulties associated with warehouse operations by automating repetitive tasks like picking, warehouse packaging and sorting. These equipment can include printers, barcode scanners, conveyor belts, hand terminals, picking arm robots, etc.
On the contrary, software automation needs to control the hardware and enable seamless 2-way data flow to the systems like ERP systems, sales channels and accounting systems in real time. It helps reduce the manual and spreadsheet-based processes while making the whole process effective.
Optimal Warehouse Staffing
Warehouse executives face extra burden during the peak festive season, so effective scheduling needs to be planned ahead of time to minimise labour management-related problems. The ideal approach for businesses to handle the peak festive season is predictive scheduling.
Effective warehouse management may result from activities, including hiring, onboarding, setting up training courses, and allocating experts according to their areas of competence. According to the Zenefits survey, over 78% of employees reported higher productivity when their flexible work schedules were set up before the busy festive season.
Forecasting Demand Volumes
According to a Salesforce study, over 42% of customers worldwide intend to purchase their holiday goods earlier because they are afraid of price increases during the festive season. Thus, precise demand forecasting becomes necessary to prevent a demand rush during the peak festive season.
Software for warehouse automation will assist in gathering previous festive season data. In addition, these systems offer workforce planning, omnichannel order management, outbound fulfilment optimisation, demand forecasting, and predictive analytics to manage order volume surges. Warehouse managers can better inform their partners so they can make allocations based on needs and forecasts if they have data readily available.
Right Warehouse Layouting
Optimising warehouse layout during high season is directly proportional to reducing turnaround time for order fulfilment. An efficient warehouse layout significantly reduces time for product handling and unnecessary associate movement related to product management.
Software for warehouse automation examines the SKUs to find the most popular and seasonal products as well as the best storage space. Pickers will spend less time walking when selling goods are positioned at the end of the aisles, which will also improve fulfilment operation.
Warehouse management systems use algorithms to determine the best employee movement. By highlighting traffic patterns and bottlenecks, it helps in warehouse mapping and allows warehouse officers to effectively organise staff movements and inventory stocking.
Conclusion
The festive season in India offers both opportunities and challenges for the warehouse management system. Inventory management, demand forecasting, right warehouse planning, optimal warehouse staffing and implementation of automation are crucial strategies that help ensure smooth warehouse management operations.
If you want a reliable partner to meet the festive season demand of your customers, contact handover. It offers an extensive range of delivery fleet such as two-wheelers, three-wheelers, trucks, electric vehicles for on-time and cost-effective deliveries.
