Adopting a warehouse management system is among the best decisions warehouse managers can make. It can help you improve inventory visibility, manage supply chain issues, and optimize your resources. A centralized system is the ultimate solution to most of your warehouse management issues.
Acumatica Cloud ERP now comes with directed paperless printing, which can be helpful in your warehouse in different ways.
This post discusses an overview of what the Acumatica paperless picking feature offers and why you want it in your system.
Why Do You Need a Paperless Picking System?
There are several advantages of using an advanced warehouse management system with a paperless picking feature. This function can improve warehouse picking efficiency in the following ways.
1) Reduces Printing Costs
First, it lowers the need to print shipping lists and tickets in your picking process. Pickers are the members of your staff who take the items clients order from the warehouse for shipping. These employees usually need to print the picklist on paper and seek out the items in storage.
With a paperless picking system integrated into your warehouse management functions, picklists will be available on mobile devices. This will eventually lower the cost of printing since you’ll require less paper and ink for your picking process.
2) Less Tedious for Pickers
After printing a pick list, pickers usually carry it to look for the items they should pull from the warehouse. They also need a scanning device to scan the packages on the list as they pick them. This can be a handful, and it’s possible to make errors or drop items while holding the list, scanning the item, and picking it from storage.
One of the ways to improve worker efficiency in the picking department is to get a paperless picking system. The function will eliminate the need to use a printed pick list, allowing workers better flexibility when handling picking tasks. It’ll also reduce the chances of order and shipment errors when the picklist is long.
3) Better Warehouse Management
Another reason you should adopt a paperless picking system is to make it easier for managers to make decisions quickly. Unfortunately, pick lists don’t provide information that can help managers prioritize orders. Sometimes, you’ll get orders that are more urgent than others, and you’ll have to prioritize them to ensure they get to the client on time.
With our warehouse management system, you’ll know which orders to prioritize. This information can help you automate and economize picking processes to make your warehouse more productive.
Features of Acumatica’s Paperless Picking System
Let’s look at what makes Acumatica’s ERP system great for improving picking efficiency in your warehouse. We have provided an overview video and additional details below.
1) Mobile-Friendliness
One of the functions that a paperless picking system can help you with is scanning the barcodes for various shipments using your phone. Since the system eliminates the need to print out the pick lists, you won’t need to carry a physical list when looking for the items from the shelves.
This mobile friendliness is a great feature that makes it more convenient for your pickers to pull orders from storage to the shipping area. In addition, since the system can interact with mobile devices, employees can use their phones to scan barcodes when picking items.
2) Inventory Management
The system could also help with inventory visibility. It’ll give your employees a way to identify and pick the ordered items much faster than usual. In other words, this feature will help improve picking efficiency and prevent confusion or shipping errors. Usually, your pickers use the picklist to search for the ordered items in the warehouse manually. This is a time-consuming and tedious process that doesn’t make the workplace more productive.
Luckily, our ERP system can help by directing pickers to the exact location of the items. This will help cut picking time since pickers can pull the orders in a shorter time. Additionally, the system can notify the picker of items in the exact general location to make picking more efficient.
3) Staff Management
It’ll also be easier to get the pickers where you need them with the Acumatica WMS. It can be hard to manage your pickers with a paper-based system, especially in large warehouses where hundreds of shipments occur daily. Also, when you don’t know who is supposed to pull an order from storage, much time will be wasted deciding on the spot.
With our system, you’ll know who is supposed to pick which shipment leading to better accountability and efficiency in the warehouse. This can help ensure routine actions like picking and packaging are handled on time without any problems.
4) Wave and Batch Picking
After you determine the number of pickers you need for a particular shipment, you can use wave picking to get the items ready for delivery. The pickers will get a list of items and have to gather and organize them and take them to the packaging department. The packers will confirm that the collected items match the order and place them into boxes.
Another method of picking is batch picking which requires the picker to collect items that appear in multiple sales orders. Once the items are brought, an operator provides packing slips that guide the packer on sorting the items. Thanks to the Picking Queue Screen, you can prioritize pick lists and monitor the progress from your computer.
5) Higher Shipping Accuracy
Paper-based processes can make picking and shipping less accurate. Unfortunately, when pickers are handling long lists of shipments, some orders could be left out. That’s why an automated warehouse management system is crucial to your picking operations.
Luckily, you can avoid shipping errors with our ERP system since you can use the system to identify the items pickers need and the storage location. As a result, you don’t have to spend time correcting orders since they’ll be accurate from the start.
Improve Your Picking Processes With Acumatica and Cloud 9 ERP Solutions
In today’s world of two-day—or same day—shipping, customer expectations have never been higher. As Amazon continues to gain a foothold in distribution, this customer expectation is bleeding into the B2B space, and to succeed, distributors need to get the pick-pack-ship and warehouse management on point.
For distribution firms, who need complete control and visibility into their products and processes, it’s often hard to find a solution that can deliver, much less a local partner to get you there. Enter Cloud 9 ERP Solutions. As a Gold Certified Acumatica Partner, we have configured and implemented Acumatica WMS for distribution firms like yours and have worked hard to understand the nuances that affect your industry. With a unique consultation process, we get to know you and your business, finding what works best for your organization, tailoring a solution based on your needs, and implementing the solution how you choose, and training users not just to survive with a new solution, but thrive. Check out what one of happy distribution customers had to say:
“....With that said, we require our ERP to be one that not only supports our everyday needs, but one that will continue to grow with us over time and will work with our newly implemented WMS. Our search for a new ERP included several solutions, one being Acumatica. Presented by their partner Cloud 9, we were educated on the platform as well as the prime food service platform. It was obvious from the first few meetings that this was the correct choice for us. Cloud 9 ERP Solutions listened to our requests and concerns and was able to address all of them. We’re looking forward to a long partnership with Acumatica and Cloud 9!”
Acumatica WMS is part of Distribution Edition and integrates to help you accurately and efficiently manage your advanced warehouse needs in wholesale, manufacturing, retail and other industries. Designed to help you take control of your warehouse processes, this module automates previously-inaccurate processes for eCommerce companies and lest you do more in less time.
Get to know more about Acumatica Distribution Edition and how it helps you streamline fulfillment to reduce errors, generate more transactions, and increase productivity.. When you’re ready to learn even more about how a Gold Certified Acumatica Partner can help you thrive with a well-configured distribution ERP, reach out to Cloud 9 ERP Solutions to get you there. Or watch our Acumatica Distribution demo.
