Our ever-developing world of commerce never stops its growth, creating a highly competitive environment. By aiming to stay on top of all the competition and maintain a leading position in the chosen niche, developing a highly efficient strategy to provide a seamlessly operating supply chain with continuous improvement of warehouse operations is essential.
As the warehouses turn to lean principles of their management, it creates a need for digital solutions to provide their implementation on life. Let’s explore lean management and what types of digital solutions help make it possible.
What Is Lean Warehouse Management?
Lean management is a growth-oriented approach that targets continuous improvement through small yet efficient steps. Lean management aims to create an optimal production chain and a robust workflow by eliminating any waste of time, money, and effort within the business process.
Since the philosophy of leanness has proven its beneficence to business management, it has also been applied to every integral part of the business process, including the warehouse.
Warehouse lean management is the strategy that is developed to streamline and optimize the processes and operations in a warehouse and thus, provide a top-notch customer experience.
Lean warehouse management is focused on reducing waste and maximizing the value of every activity within the warehouse to provide an efficient flow of goods from receiving to shipping.
Lean Warehouse Principles
1. Values
Lean management aims to deliver the best value for the goods and services, minimizing resource loss or waste while reaching the end customer. With lean management, speed and accuracy are emphasized, as those are the main components of the customers’ expectations.
2. Value stream
The value of the goods and services is provided through a streamlined cycle of the products’ life – from production to delivery, from raw material to finished goods. The value stream is focused on identifying unnecessary steps and excessive inventory and eliminating them from the line.
3. Flow
A continuous and smooth production flow starts with the raw materials and finishes with ready-to-use goods. The uninterrupted flow of goods is provided by eliminating the excessive steps in the warehouse layout by implementing digital solutions like SAP EWM in the cloud, which helps to bring visibility into every level of inventory tracking.
4. Pull
This fundamental principle is based on what the customers really want, taking care of their actual needs rather than just forecasts. The pull system can be implemented with SAP Commerce and AI-powered solutions, which provide clear insights into the demands of society, stimulating the right amount of production and avoiding unnecessary expenses.
5. Perfection
Perfection is reached through non-stop insights into the performance and regular audits of the production processes. Such control helps to identify or anticipate the issues at the early stage, letting to make timely decisions to avoid any delays or cancelations in the supply chain.
By taking these principles as the basis for the functioning, the warehouses become an efficient and non-stop integral part of the supply chain.
Why Implement Lean Warehouse Management?
Lean warehousing is the demand of time. If the long-term functioning of the business is in focus, streamlining all the processes and business management is a crucial requirement for keeping a stably growing position within the chosen niche.
As long as our production is highly digitalized, lean warehousing isn’t an exception. Lean warehousing requires specific digital solutions that can combine all the parts of the production process and make them all work together. One such solution is SAP ERP, which consists of numerous interconnected modules dedicated to a specific part of the business process.
As long as the supply chain and warehouse are under question, there are a few solutions to consider:
- SAP EWM (Extended Warehouse Management)– offers an extensive view of the warehouse interactions and maintains the entire logistics process in the warehouse.
- SAP YL (Yard logistics) – provides visibility into a small yet vital part of the chain, the yard (plant premises).
- SAP SCP (Supply Chain Planning) – ensures better quality control, increased uptime, reduced inventory, enhanced tracking, etc.
- SAP ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) – a business-planning solution, a basic uniting platform that can be integrated with all the separate modules, and gives every business owner a vision of the business functioning and its management regarding the whole company, not just the warehouse.
Considering the fact that there are 64 modules of SAP to decide on, it is worth contacting the proficient advisors here, and asking for guidance into the SAP environment. As LeverX is a global leading SAP provider, nobody but them can give a clear perspective of the development when implementing SAP solutions.
Benefits of Lean Warehouse Management
- Enhanced productivity
- Lower cost of product
- Boost of customer satisfaction
- Improved inventory management and control
- Better control over the stock
- Improved ergonomics of the process
- Better and more efficient working conditions and responsibilities of the workers
- Maximized level of flexibility in the highly fluctuating market of demand
The Bottom Line
Implementing lean management is the key to a prosperous existence and growing profit. It helps streamline all the processes within the supply chain, eliminating any excessiveness, be it activities, timings, or stock replenishment.
As long as life at the warehouse is strictly regulated, the customers will get everything delivered within the shortest terms, preserving the impeccable quality of goods.
Implementing lean principles through SAP is the first step in a success-oriented strategy in a highly competitive market. Don’t hesitate to contact the LeverX specialists, who will lead you to a more efficient form of business management.
