IBM Software

Warehouse Operations

IBM Sterling Warehouse Management System

Increase warehouse productivity and reduce costs
Executive summary Overview
In this solution overview, you will learn:

How you can improve every aspect of your warehouse operations How you can centrally manage resources across a network of locations How Sterling Sterling Warehouse Management System (WMS) helps handle change across your entire enterprise

Warehouse operations today must be flexible to accommodate changes driven by market requirements, customer mandates or supply chain disruptions. Through the use of new technology, companies now have the ability to respond quickly and easily to change, while managing inventory and productivity across a network of locations. As a result, companies are reducing inventory levels and achieving increased productivity in their supply chain.

What is IBM Sterling Warehouse Management System?

Sterling Warehouse Management System (Sterling WMS) is a complete solution for managing your warehouse operations. It can manage a single warehouse or provide a central point of control that spans multiple facilities of varying types. With its service-oriented architecture (SOA) and strong integration capabilities, Sterling WMS easily integrates with your existing infrastructure and material handling equipment, as well as supports new technologies like radio frequency identification (RFID). Sterling WMS brings operational discipline to complex warehouse operations by providing a planning layer, a realtime execution layer, and an operational monitoring tool to ensure optimal utilization of resources.

Benefits

Lower cost of warehouse operations through increased productivity Higher customer satisfaction through improved perfect order fulfillment rates Lower inventory through increased visibility across the extended enterprise Greater flexibility to adapt quickly to changing requirements for increased profitability

Improve productivity
Sterling WMS efficiently executes available work and tasks for improved productivity. The application automatically assigns the best possible match for a task to a user based on permission or skill to do the work, the type of equipment, proximity, and priority. Using a unique learning capability, Sterling WMS can derive standard allowable minutes (SAM) from historical task activity to track associates performance. These standards determine precise specifics for each task based on its actual work characteristics, including vehicle speed and distance, using varying coordinates and weight. Engineering standards can also be imported or manually entered into the system.

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Warehouse Operations

Within Sterling WMS, the Resource Planner module helps companies manage demand through dynamic labor deployment, verifying in real time whether demand can be fulfilled with available capacity and, when capacity falls short, helping assign resources to cover the shortfall. The resulting graphical views and what if scenarios help organizations manage demand variability, leading to on time fulfillment and optimal resource utilization. Getting the most from your warehouses capacity is critical for efficient execution. Sterling WMS manages space utilization through efficient inventory management capabilities that include:

You can rely on Sterling WMS to help you react to market changes quickly and efficiently, implement process changes, ensure compliance across your entire network and provide more consistent service to your customers. It is designed to facilitate multi-enterprise/multidivision environments to support your business strategy and all channels to market. A comprehensive set of tools that enables you to quickly onboard new enterprises, locations, business units or clients, as well as roll out new processes to remote locations lowers the cost of deployment. Sterling Warehouse Management System gives your company a single comprehensive view of all inventory by aggregating inventory from all locations and providing a view of what is available internally as well as at partner locations. It also shows what is being supplied, and the level of current demand. This extensive visibility enables companies to implement a leaner inventory model to help drive costs out of their supply chain.

Optimal storage locations based on an items velocity Advanced slotting capabilities for minimal travel times Directed put-away Cross-docking capabilities Dynamic slotting for wave planning Outbound picking strategies to clear locations Wave planning for discrete order picking

Centralized control, local execution

With the Sterling Warehouse Management System, you can centrally manage inventory, labor, and processes across a network of facilities regardless of size, location, or process mix. IBM deploys best-in-class functionality to operate both locally and at the network level, as well as across all types of inventory-stocking situations, from the largest facilities down to the smallest stocking sites. With the capability to scale to high transaction volumes for all activities, Sterling WMS has the power to support the largest configuration of warehouses, regardless of location. Sterling WMS is designed to support network-wide deployments that require multiple language support and different units of measure, configurable down to the user level.

Stay responsive with a process-centric application

Sterling WMS process-centric advantages include:

Rapid response to customer demands through easy configurability Reduced IT costs through reusability of configured components Higher productivity and customer service through integrated monitoring, event, and task management Seamless application integration through an advanced integration layer

The process-modeling capability of Sterling WMS functions as a central management headquarters for the introduction and rollout of new processes and technologies across your entire organization. With its robust planning, execution and measurement tools, you can ensure that your resources are utilized in a way that minimizes operational costs while maximizing customer satisfaction.

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Warehouse Operations

Figure 1: Sterling WMS is a component in the Commerce family of solutions from IBM

Additionally, Sterling WMS provides a comprehensive solution for warehouse management that includes:

Gain supplier compliance, greater visibility

With Sterling WMS you can deploy functionality to suppliers on an as-needed basis to enforce ASN standards, RFID mandates, label formatting, data standards, quality, and packaging compliance. As for visibility, Sterling WMS provides a dashboard view of real-time warehouse activity. It places order and inventory information in the hands of operators regardless of time or location. This includes participants outside the four walls of the distribution center, such as carriers, customers, and suppliers. In addition, embedded decision-support tools combine information on warehouse operations with real-time updates of activity across the supply chain, improving your ability to make continuous improvements and ensure that customer orders are accurately fulfilled.

Inbound capabilities that provide visibility and scheduling for inbound shipments, from pre-receiving to inventory storage Outbound scheduling and management coordinates advanced outbound operations, including shipment grouping and wave planning Reverse logistics capabilities brings rules-based processing for returns, exchanges and repairs Value-added services supports kitting, light assembly and customer specific workflows such as labeling, build-tocustomer and build-to-order fulfillment

IBM Software

Warehouse Operations

Sterling Warehouse Management System

Capability
Productivity manager IBM Sterling Resource Planning Product management

Description
Tracks productivity of labor using engineering standards or performance data derived from task execution history. Monitors warehouse workload based on actual and forecast demand, enabling dynamic redeployment of resources to resolve any imbalances. Delivers improved inventory accuracy by tracking user-defined product attributes such as lot number, serial number, and configurable units of measure. Provides comprehensive visibility to inbound shipments, scheduling, prereceiving, receiving, and put away of receipts. Enables tracking of inventory at a location, in a case or on a pallet, based on item attributes including lot number and serial number. Provides a goals and constraints-based approach to testing and optimizing slotting strategies. Improves operational productivity by providing warehouses the ability to perform order pick tasks using handsfree execution. Coordinates the order-release process and shipment routing to streamline outbound order processing through the grouping of shipments and wave planning. Ensures accurate billing history for all tasks executed, enabling companies to understand the true cost to serve multiple products, clients, or divisions.

Inbound management

Inventory management

IBM Sterling WMS slotting Pick-to-voice

Outbound scheduling and management Activity reporting

Realize the benefits of Sterling WMS now

Sterling Warehouse Management System is part of the IBM Commerce family of solutions, a suite of applications that gives you complete visibility and control over your sales, fulfillment and logistics processes. IBM Commerce family of solutions manages all steps of the order life cycle from inquiry to cash as a single, unified process across the extended enterprise.

Choose your deployment option

IBM has collaborative applications that are available in a variety of deployment and operational models to meet your business needs, and can be delivered on premise or as a service. As a service offers the additional option of consuming the solution in a hosted, managed service or software as a service subscription model. With IBM, you have more choice and the best opportunity for optimization of your investment, with assured delivery of the right mix of scalability, reliability, availability and security to support your business objectives.

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