Real-time access to data about what items are in your warehouse and where they are located is vital to ensuring efficiency for every business. If a shipment of materials is not tracked accurately, it may get lost in the warehouse, resulting in time loss as workers look for it or financial loss if the materials have to be reordered.
A warehouse management system (WMS) tracks and maintains a record of every item – down to each unit – that comes in and out of the warehouse. While this is a powerful tool, the vast amount of information generated by the WMS is siloed away from the rest of the business.
Let’s explore how integrating your WMS with other business systems can create a more efficient supply chain to improve warehouse management and the fulfillment process.
What Is a Warehouse Management System?
A warehouse management system is software used to monitor the flow of materials and finished products in and out of a storage facility. The WMS is a vital tool used in industries such as manufacturing, food and beverage production, and retail, where the location of materials and products can change quickly and often. Each unit is assigned a stock keeping unit (SKU) and tracked from the time of arrival, along its journey through the warehouse, and as it departs for its destination.
What Are Common Warehouse Management Systems?
Boomi has custom-built connectors with three of the biggest WMS platforms on the market:
Why Does a WMS Matter?
In manufacturing, shipments coming into the warehouse often arrive from multiple third-party vendors. The contents of these shipments are combined to make products that are then sent out of the warehouse to be sold by a retailer or directly to a customer. The process of assembling the components into a finished product can cause logistical problems if each step is not tracked in detail.
In food and beverage production, products risk spoiling if they are not properly stored or shipped quickly enough. Time from arrival to distribution is also an essential measure in determining freshness. If a warehouse storing food products loses track of a shipment, there is a financial loss due to costs associated with spoilage.
But with precision data generated by a WMS, efficiencies in storage, picking, and shipping processes can be quickly designed based on the latest data. The best-selling products can be placed closer to the shipping bays, and specialty components can be stored together to make product assembly faster. These efficiencies add up to further time savings and cost savings.
These benefits are multiplied significantly with an integrated WMS.
What Is an Integrated WMS?
On its own, a WMS system provides a clear picture of a warehouse’s contents at any given time. This information is useful for managing and optimizing how that warehouse operates. Still, it cannot share data without manually exporting and transferring that data.
On the other hand, an integrated WMS system is connected with your business systems, allowing data to be shared instantly and automatically. Correcting that starts by integrating your WMS with your other legacy systems using an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) tool. This low-code integration approach means you can use one connectivity platform for all of your business systems.
What Are the Benefits of WMS Integration With iPaaS?
WMS integration with an iPaaS system like Boomi makes connectivity simple. The drag-and-drop interface eliminates the need for coding skills, allowing anyone in the organization to build connections between your systems.
An integration platform like Boomi also enables you to keep your legacy systems connected with modern, cloud-based applications. When traditionally siloed systems share data automatically, they can finally operate collaboratively. For example:
- Labor Management Systems (LMS): Integration allows comparing worker performance data with material and product data to match workers with the tasks they do most efficiently.
- Warehouse Control Systems (WCS): Integration lets the WCS control individual machines like conveyor systems and picker robots, providing more efficient instructions with data from the WMS.
- Warehouse Execution Systems (WES): Integration brings inventory data together with process data to reveal process inefficiencies so that you can reorganize operational sequences.
Easily Scale Warehouse Operations
When you decide to scale your business, the iPaaS will integrate with any new tools you implement, automatically sharing your entire software ecosystem’s data with the newly integrated software. The benefits of unifying all your logistical data sources into a single system built on an iPaaS foundation stretch beyond the warehouse’s walls. For example:
Supply chain
Integrating your WMS with other supply chain management (SCM) systems allows you to oversee the entire supply chain from the same system. Data from enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, transportation management systems, and other SCM systems can automate processes to keep your materials and products moving smoothly through the supply chain. By removing the need for manual data entry, paper bills of lading, or any other human intervention, the path from raw material to your customer’s front door will be significantly more efficient and reliable.
eCommerce
If your warehouse ships directly to customers when they buy from you online, your WMS can provide real-time product availability data to your ecommerce platform. This will make sure your customers are always shown accurate information on product availability and time to restock. You can ensure a positive customer experience with each sale by eliminating mistakes resulting from lagging inventory data.
Fulfillment
Fulfillment tools like order management systems (OMS) can integrate with WMS to share data to determine the most effective order fulfillment plan. This is especially helpful for businesses with warehouses in multiple regions. The OMS will have information on what items are in an order and where they need to be sent, while the WMS will know which warehouses have them. With these two pieces of data, the order can be fulfilled by the warehouse closest to the customer, saving shipping costs and reducing overall time to delivery.
Ready to learn more about how iPaaS can help you integrate your WMS with your other business systems? Explore the process yourself with a free trial.