Warehouse Management Systems in the Cloud

For SMB’s seeking to grow, and compete with the bigger players, there comes a time when you need to ask yourself whether you should continue to manage your warehouse logistics via spreadsheets and in house financial systems. Cloud-based solutions offer best-of-breed functionality, speedy market reaction-times, any-time/anywhere access and cost-effectiveness.

Best-of-breed Warehouse Functionality

To grow and compete, mid-sized businesses need proper warehouse functionality, beyond what spreadsheets and other ad-hoc solutions can provide. You need a proper warehouse management framework that will efficiently manage your inventory, inbound and outbound processing via task management, as well as user management and authorisation, but that will integrate easily with your other systems (most commonly, finance and RF devices)

A best-of-breed Cloud-based solution is ideal for the mid-sized business operator – you get to take advantage of a system that has been designed to deliver rich functionality to a market-base who insists on current global trends, and which is deployed in a format that inherently supports scalability, easy access and flexibility.

Speedy Market Reaction Times

Today, we live and work in virtual and emerging markets. Consumers can instantly act on their needs – if they want something, they can order it straight away. This significantly impacts warehouse management, and those businesses who can respond quickly to changing demand, have a significant competitive advantage.

Cloud-based Warehouse management solutions allow you to quickly react to changing situations, by offering you the ability to adjust your workflows from anywhere, and on any device.

When those unpredictable events happen that unexpectedly impact the demand for specific goods it’s important to have real-time information about the availability and quantities of goods within your supply chain – so you can make sure that goods are being sold, instead of still being in stock at the manufacturer or sitting in your warehouse.

With markets changing incredibly quickly – even hourly – losing pace isn’t an option, and cloud based WMS solutions offer businesses the ability to stay in synch with the market, and ultimately stay ahead of the competition.

Ease of Access

The stand-out quality of cloud-based systems is the ease of access – a best-of-breed cloud-based WMS will give you any-time/anywhere access, (with role-based authorisation and permissions), and run from any device with web-access, be it mobile or desktop.

Cost-effectiveness

A quality cloud-based WMS can be extremely cost-effective for the mid-sized player, offering financial benefits in a range of ways:

• No additional hardware infrastructure required
• Low up-front cost because of SAAS delivery
• Scalable to your requirements
• Easy installation and configuration
• Ease of use that minimizes training requirements