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Tips to Manage Multiple Warehouses Like a Pro

Do you know that owning multiple warehouses is actually a benefit for your customer? Do you know how to improve a multi warehousing process without splurging money? We tell you more on those terms in this post.

Meena Veilumuthu 4 Stories

Wednesday October 26, 2016 , 4 min Read

Multiple warehouses are usually owned by organizations that have markets spread across several geographies. Multiple warehouses deliver customers with the benefit of time and utility that does not come off so easily with single location warehouses. They also facilitate quicker deliveries to customers, help reduce transportation costs and provides the business with easier accessibility to raw materials and stored finished goods.

Sadly, managing multiple warehouses is a real pain. From duplicated paperwork to keeping track of what comes in, goes out and inventory management - there is a hell lot work to be done on a routine basis.

Here are some multi warehousing strategies you can adopt to make the process a cake walk affair.

Maintain Warehouse Wise Inventory Control

Warehouse wise inventory control helps achieve a critical cost-benefit - no overstocking of stocks. Most eCommerce retailers (as well as others) make the mistake of maintaining product wise inventory records only.

This is highly misleading, since in the event of an immediate delivery in one location, stocks cannot be moved from the other warehouse. The order might potentially be missed leaving the business at a loss of fill rate. A warehouse management system will help monitor and maintain your inventory control from multiple locations.

Identify Which Warehouse Needs What Stock

Part of exercising inventory control for multiple warehouses is knowing how much stock each warehouse. It is not necessary to procure and dispatch every SKU to every warehouse you own.

Use a warehouse management software with analytic capabilities to do a sales analysis. Identify what kind of stocks move the most from which warehouses. Categorize each warehouse based on such movement. Allocate stocks only based on such analysis. It will help negate the possibility of overstocking or dead stock across all warehouses.

Keep Optimum Stock Levels

Maximum level, minimum level, average level and reorder level. These are mathematically derived stock levels based on your consumption rates, lead time and inventory turnover. Plan the inventory level at each warehouse based on these metrics.

In fact, fixating stock levels must be an integral component of your warehouse inventory management strategy. Optimum stock keeping will help keep stock costs at bare minimum and will avoid wastage - the ultimate objective of multiple warehouse management.

Automate Warehouse Management

Automating multiple warehouse management with a warehouse inventory software will help cut down manual interference, improve accuracy of operations and most importantly help manage stock levels in a better fashion.

Big stock carriers like Walmart, Amazon, Tesco, etc. believe automating warehouse management to be one of the best warehousing practices that every retailer and wholesale seller must adopt for long-term profitability.

A warehouse inventory software will facilitate managing inventory across multiple warehouses. A cloud connected inventory management system can in fact give real-time insights into stock levels, highlight warehouse locations where stock procurement will have to initiated in the near future and also help integrate procurement and selling strategies into it.

Here are some warehouse inventory software you can consider for managing multiple warehouse locations:

Contalog

Contalog is a clever warehouse management software complete with features for managing multiple warehouse locations. Contalog helps you have a pulse of your stock levels at all times with channel wise specific stock statuses, centralized tracking of inventory, bin location tracking, warehouse transfers and much more.

Tradegecko

Tradegecko is another great offering to make your inventory management across several locations a fuss-free affair. Striking features that Tradegecko offers its customers include warehouse wise order fulfillment, inter-warehouse stock transfer, sell on consignment basis, location reports, user rights moderation and remote team collaboration.

Ecomdash

Ecomdash promises to route all your orders to the right warehouse automatically. Purchase orders for inter-warehouse transfers can be created directly from the dashboard. Ecomdash also gives real-time information about stock levels across multiple warehouses.