Are you one of the 22% of companies in the UK who have taken the essential planning actions recommended for Brexit? If so, you will have completed all of the necessary paperwork, obtained your EORI number and put any extra provision with logistics providers and customs agents in place. Well done you!
If, however, you are in the 78%, then you may, like many companies across the UK, have begun stockpiling alcohol, as you fear Brexit could disrupt supplies over the festive period. However, with new reports from UKWA’s Chief Executive Peter Ward stating that there are as little as 250,000 pallet locations available across the country – you may find you need to start getting your warehouse in order and taking count of your current stock!
This is where your ERP software can help. Below are our top 3 ways that our ERP software currently helps customers to manage their warehouses during busy periods.
1. Demand planning
Demand planning software can help you to optimise your stock levels across multiple warehouses. By being able to look at historic information relating to monthly and seasonal trends, you can see reliable forecasting for the months and year ahead, without needing to overstock your warehouse.
One result of using our demand planning tools has been customers having less stock in their warehouses. We’ve also eliminated the need for customers to run promotions on products that sat in their warehouses for lengthy periods of time and approached their ‘sell by’ dates, that result in financial losses. As a result, we have seen savings for customers of up to £80,000 in 2018 alone, just by utilising our demand planning tools.
2. Avoid mis-picks
If your warehouse is currently full to the brim because you have overstocked for the holiday season, it is probably quite chaotic and you might not know where all of your good are at any given time. This chaos can lead to human error which can cost your business tens of thousands of pounds per year.
Your ERP software should enable you track every good entering your warehouse, and every movement once it’s there so you don’t need to spend hours finding a crate of beer. For our customers, we created a warehouse mapping tool which helps them find goods in seconds rather than minutes. Better yet, RF scanning ensures that they don’t select a crate of Merlot instead of Shiraz!
Problems with mis-picks was a key area for our customer JJ Fox. However, with our ERP software, warehouse staff were able to reduce picking errors by 50%. (Read the full case study here). An added benefit was that they didn’t have to spend hours completing stock takes. In fact, with the Gaina system, their operational staff were able to reduce the time taken to stock take by at least 60% without compromising accuracy.
3. Stock allocation
With lots of stock sitting in your warehouse, your ERP software can ensure that it isn’t losing you money. Our ERP software can track all of our customers existing inventory and point to a location where they need to go. This can be sorted by First In First out (FIFO) or best before (in the example of beers and “alco-pops”) so they never run the risk of storing out-of-date stock.
And, if you have stock in Bond, the stock allocation functionality in our Bond software will always select duty paid stock first and automatically transfers stock from bond to duty paid, as needed. This means you don’t end up paying more duty than you have to!
Anything can happen between now and the 31st January 2020, much of which is out of your control. However, what you can control is how you manage the goods coming in and out of your own warehouse beyond a BREXIT decision so that you don’t end up losing money in your warehouse.
If you want to find out more about how our ERP software can help, get in touch via the contact form below!