Choosing a Warehouse Management System (WMS) is one of the crucial steps to growing your business, automating basic tasks, managing your people and creating efficiencies in your business. Once in place the right system will almost run your business for your from streamlining your goods-in, control and movement of stock within the warehouse, right through to ensuring picking and despatching orders is performed as efficiently as possible.
We spoke to Jonathan Bellwood, founder of Peoplevox to find out what you should consider when choosing a WMS and to find out more about Peoplevox and what they can offer your business:
What does Peoplevox do?
More than 100 retailers in 20 countries rely on Peoplevox’s warehouse management (WMS) and fulfilment software. These include such well-known names as Barbour, Bells Shoes, Intersport, JD Sports, Mothercare, Oliver Bonas and The Range,
Peoplevox is dedicated to ensuring brands, pure-play and multichannel retailers achieve their e-commerce fulfilment objectives. The company’s WMS solution is currently responsible for the fulfilment of over 3 million parcels a month.
Jonathan Bellwood founded Peoplevox in 2009. Previously, Jonathan had spent eight years working in supply chain solutions for Symbol Technologies and Motorola. During this time he gained first-hand experience of e-commerce retailers’ frustrations when attempting to implement costly and inflexible legacy warehouse management systems. This inspired him to create Peoplevox and offer retailers a fit for purpose WMS solution for the e-commerce age.
What would your ideal Client look like?
- Global retail warehouses
- Brands
- Pure-play
- Multichannel
- High Growth Startups
Sectors include:
- Fashion & Accessories
- Health & Beauty
- Lifestyle
- Luxury
- Home & Garden
- DIY & Electricals
Why should an ecommerce retailer consider a WMS?
As the retailer’s e-commerce business starts to grow a ‘paper and pen’ approach to warehouse management, or continued reliance on their existing back office ERP module, will be unable to scale, creating operational inefficiencies which will impact on the bottom line through rising costs, loss of sales opportunities, and customer loyalty.
A dedicated WMS will provide live-to-the-second updates on available stock items for sale even if they are still at Goods In; ensure maximum productivity by optimising picking routes and supporting mobile barcode/RFID devices; enable pickers to prioritise based on type of order and deadlines; ensure total accuracy at the despatch bench through automated reconciliation of actual items ordered; and the printing of correctly addressed shipping labels.
When should a retailer consider a WMS?
A suitable WMS implementation at the outset will always better than cure. However, the vital signs of an increasingly stressed warehouse include, for example, an increase in under- or over-selling, over-staffing, or an increase in unforced errors from mispicking or incorrect address labelling. All of these will inevitably slow things down, reduce productivity and incur unnecessary costs. And ultimately they impact on time to delivery.
Other warning signs are where staff members are perhaps trying to cope with too much volume, not being sure where to put or find things, regularly missing targets and deadlines, or dealing with too many customer complaints. Similarly, working in a fog of misinformation, struggling to keep up with paperwork, feeling like they are letting down colleagues in sales, marketing or finance, are all symptoms of rising stress levels in the warehouse.
What should a retailer consider when looking for a WMS?
The pace and complexities of modern retailing are often a step too far for legacy on-premise WMS systems, many of which were designed two decades or more ago before the dawn of the e-commerce age.
Look for a mobile-first e-commerce WMS with Android capability which is built for e-commerce and multi-channel, and able to support operations from goods-in, through control and movement of stock within the warehouse, to picking and despatching orders, and can be tailored to suit different processes.
Most important, is it available through software as a service (SaaS) subscription? Instead of outright purchase, this model enables an otherwise Capex investment to be made more affordable by funding it from Opex. SaaS will also reduce total cost of ownership by allowing software maintenance and updates to be performed remotely, and ensure minimal reliance on in-house IT staff.
What else should the WMS offer?
- Order control and tracking: single and multiple batch management allowing efficient and accurate picking, from small e-commerce through to large store or wholesale orders
- Scalability: for managing single or multiple warehouses, will it increase and decrease users at will?
- Configurable reports and dashboards: ensure real-time and historical metrics on a wide range of warehouse operations including live-to-the-second stock levels and employee performance
- Off-the-shelf-integration: look for seamless computability with all major e-commerce platforms, ERP tools and shipping software
- Open API support: will it accommodate additional external systems required?
Why use Peoplevox over the competition?
From Goods Receipt through to Despatch, the Peoplevox WMS has been purpose designed to support and streamline online retailers’ fulfilment operations – every step of the way.
Harnessing the flexibility and elasticity benefits of cloud-based software as a service (SaaS), the software is quickly and easily deployable by Clients, even those without IT skills and resources. With as much support as needed from Peoplevox, they can configure the software to meet their specific business and warehouse procedures within a matter of hours.
Accessible from mobile devices and online, Peoplevox puts powerful e-commerce logistics software at the user’s fingertips, enabling maximum convenience and productivity. Its open architecture allows compatibility with a wide range of scanners as well as easy integration with all leading e-commerce Sales, Marketplace, Delivery, ERP and Accounting platforms. This enables clients easy access to solutions such as Magento, ChannelAdvisor, MetaPack, Hybris, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, Sage, NetSuite, Salesforce, Demandware and Shopify.
Case Study: Peoplevox E-commerce Warehouse Management and Fulfilment
SkateHut is a leading UK-based one stop shop for everything to do with skates. They have two stores, three warehouses and over 20,000 products to choose.
The Challenge
Prior to implementing the Peoplevox SaaS-based e-commerce Warehouse Management System (WMS) in 2013, SkateHut was using manual picking and despatch as well as paper orders for picking and separate courier orders. Their rapid growth highlighted some key operational weaknesses such as over-selling, mis-picking and stock inaccuracy.
In order to manage the rising pressure, they had to use buffers for stock, just to allow for overselling. They also had to have dedicated Customer Service Advisors to contact customers regarding out of stock items.
It simply became an unscalable process and put pressure on the business as a whole, especially at peak times.
Benefits
Increasing customer satisfaction
SkateHut now has a full and 100% accurate stock control to eliminate overselling. Cut off for same day despatch also moved from 3pm to 7pm for next day delivery, allowing them to create a better supported customer journey and service.
Improved people management
They now need fewer Customer Service Advisors and they no longer need expert pickers who know the product well, as everything is now bar coded.
Pickers can now be trained in half a day which means temporary staff get up and running much more quickly than before.
Creating efficiency
Overall, the business has been able to scale to where they want to be and will be able to keep growing without the need to change.
Contact Peoplevox
Peoplevox headquarters are in London at 1 Fore Street, Moorgate, London, EC2Y 5EJ.
You can contact them on +44 (0) 203 824 1395 in the UK, on +1-929-224-0715 for the US, via email at [email protected] or direct via the Peoplevox website
