Editor's Note: This is a prologue to Murph's new 'Warehouse Wednesday' series, which features an in-depth look at Acumatica ERP. While the Introduction to the series was published within Insightful Accountant, the series is part of Insightful Accountant's new "Be Insightful" Premium content. Future series will provide an in-depth look at various other ERP alternatives to QuickBooks Enterprise for users considering migration.
I wrote about Acumatica as an ERP focusing on Wholesale and Distribution a few weeks ago. In today's Warehouse Wednesday edition, I'm diving into Acumatica's distributor and warehouse functionalities in even greater depth.
Managing a distributor operation is relatively easy when you are small. However, inventory and warehouse management requirements become increasingly tricky as your distributor business grows and new locations and product lines are added.
Growing distributors find themselves needing to modernize their operations to compete. This often necessitates replacing the business's current accounting system with an ERP incorporating warehouse management functionality.
Distributors must consider various features when modernizing their inventory, warehouse operations, and business systems. These features should provide distributors with the tools to eliminate manual data entry, streamline business processes, and improve the visibility of inventory and warehouse activities.
More and more, distributors now rely on an array of modern technologies to accomplish the tasks before them. Time-consuming manual inventory and warehouse data entry are time-consuming and prone to errors. Paper-based inventory documents, picking and packing lists, and shipping manifests must be automated within a modern ERP to avoid 'the old manual ways of doing things.'
To improve their distribution processes, distributors must understand the inventory and warehouse features within their ERP/WMS to automate inventory, order processing, warehouse configuration, and the dynamic flow of orders outbound and inbound. AI-technology built into these processes can significantly streamline each operation and help maximize performance and efficiency.
Acumatica ERP, which specializes in order management, inventory management, and warehouse management, provides a sound basis for growing distributors. It includes functionality for Purchase Orders, Sales Orders, and even Manufacturing or Kitting Orders if required. Place orders for any items you acquire from vendors, whether stock or non-stock, including acceptable substitutes from alternative vendors.
With Acumatica's automated purchase requisitioning, you will bundle requests from multiple sources, including your different order fulfillment warehouses, to aggregate supplier fulfillment to gain the best price, then issue purchase orders and receive the items when they arrive regardless of the locations you had shipments made to.
Acumatica makes vendor selection easy with updated prices and delivery options from all vendors, providing a specific SKU or substitute. Your purchasing and receiving managers will gain visibility into purchase requisitions, purchase orders, and received orders using their customized dashboards.
However, what good is an efficient purchasing system and processes if your inventory gets clogged up in your various warehouses' receiving, put-away, stocking, and distribution fulfillment activities? That is why Acumatica simplifies your inventory processes with warehouse, aisle, rack, shelf, and bin management across your dispersed geographical locations.
Acumatica simplifies the setup and management of multiple warehouse locations and lets you configure warehouse workflows. Automation eliminates the risk of workers skipping steps, increases productivity, and reduces training costs.
You will automate receiving, put-away in transit, stock location, returns, transfers, decommissioned or scrap products, picked but not packed, packed by not delivered/shipped, and other sub-locations for each warehouse, creating sense-making workflows. Your warehouse will never be as streamlined as automated data capture with native barcoding and flexible label printing that includes all product characteristics, not just items and location.
Orders will wiz into and out of your warehouse with Acumatica's warehouse efficiency features designed to maximize labor performance. Acumatica is designed to help you preclude mistakes in order fulfillment that result in costly returns and lower customer satisfaction. With efficient barcode scanning for lot and serial numbers, pick verification eliminates over-shipments, under-shipments, and incorrect item shipments.
Regarding order picking, Acumatica's 'bidirectional picking' improves warehouse performance, especially with features like 'directed picking' as do 'wave or batch picking. Of course, barcoded pick lists enhance all this picking and streamline the fulfillment of orders within your warehouses.
How about a warehouse operation where the packing requirements for each specific item are defined? Acumatica's 'packing definition' feature lets you preconfigure the appropriate packing materials and sized packaging containers for your products. Verify proper packing using barcodes to capture data, including item and lot/serial numbers, to ensure that you are shipping the products recorded for quality control.
Speaking of quality control, when it comes time to quantify the accuracy of your inventory and warehouse management functions, Acumatica's Quality Management feature allows you to accurately report on the various quality tests you configure and perform during inventory receiving, order processing, outbound distribution (delivery/shipment), and returns.
Throughout it all, Acumatica provides real-time insights into sales orders, warehouse activities, inventory status, employee productivity, outbound orders distributed, inbound inventory on order, received, available to order fulfillment, and the best location for order fulfillment. You will have better metrics and be confident in this single source of truth for your distribution business.
Watch for Part 7 of this series in a week or two.
Disclosures:
Acumatica, as used herein, refers to one or more registered trademarks of Acumatica, Inc., a privately held, multi-national corporation headquartered in Kirkland, WA (USA). Since 2019, Acumatica has been held by the private equity firm EQT of Stockholm, Stockholms Lan, Sweden.
Any other trade names used herein, including those of the sponsors (vendors) featured within this article, refer to products that may be registered, trademarked, or otherwise held by their respective owners; they are referenced for informational and educational purposes only.
Feature product-related content derived from Acumatica media source materials. Content derived from Acumatica sources is published by Insightful Accountant for informational and educational purposes only.
This is an editorial feature, not sponsored content. No company or other person mentioned in this article has paid Insightful Accountant or the author any remuneration to be the subject of this feature. The article is provided solely for informational and educational purposes.
The publication of this article should not be interpreted as an endorsement by either the author or Insightful Accountant.