WAREHOUSE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR AUTO-PART BUSINESS - CASE STUDY

System Vision Document for Auto-Parts Manufacturing Warehouse

• Problem Identification

A warehouse management system (WMS) software allows the organizations to control and administer the overall warehouse operations starting from the time the goods enter the warehouse till the time the goods leave the warehouse for final customers (Ramaa, Subramanya, & Rangaswamy, 2012). A good WMS system allows the companies to reduce labor cost, improve inventory accuracy, reduce lost time, decrease the errors in shipping and picking of orders and improve responsiveness. Inventory management in automotive spare parts business is very important because overstocking would mean that the inventory is becoming obsolete or is being wasted due to rusting (Kalchschmidt, Zotteri, & Verganti, 2003). Similarly understocking of some inventory parts will mean car manufacturing companies will rely on some other suppliers hence losses are likely to incur. 

Given the case study, Jack and Daniel are facing issues in their WMS that is unable to handle dynamic procedures in moving and storing inventory at peak efficiency and at lowest cost. Jack and Daniel have shown concerns about the capability of current WMS as it is not fulfilling its main functions like order processing, inventory tracking, order loading/offloading, packing and creating outbound documentations as well as crystal reports for the organization. Due to these issues and problems in current WMS, it is recommended that a new system (preferably Fishbowl) to be deployed for the organization for managing the inventory and order processing at inbound, storage and outbound levels. This system will be deployed on basis of wireless technologies i.e. mobile applications, cloud and RFID. 

• Capabilities of Software

Jack and Daniel, in the meeting have outlined the minimum capabilities that the Fishbowl must show i.e. inventory control, order processing, pickup and processing of orders, order load management, system alerts, packing of orders and creation of outbound communication reports. All of these capabilities are expected of Fishbowl to be apparent so that the efficiency of inventory management can be increased and lowest cost can be achieved (Amoah, 2017). Below are the expected capabilities of Fishbowl that will help Jack and Daniel in achieving their objectives.

• Stock Movement

The new proposed WMS will allow Jack and Daniel to use advanced tracking system using barcoding and radio-frequency identification (RFID) for making sure that the inventory can be found easily whenever it is needed to be moved (Arevalo, 2016). 

The newly proposed WMS will allow Jack and Daniel to automatically track the inventory as it progresses from receiving to dispatching while taking into account all the adjustments like returns and credits. Fishbowl will also have the additional capability of recalculating the minimum and maximum stock levels so that stock runouts and over stocking be eliminated (Castillo, 2017). This WMS will allow Jack and Daniel to achieve efficiency at lowest cost possible through automatic demand predictions based on sales history. 

Similarly, Fishbowl will provide a complete physical map on wireless phones and tablets of Jack and Daniel along with their team members so that the workers can find exact bin location for inventory picking, packing, receiving and counting.