Imagine receiving an order for an item and not knowing if you have it in your inventory and can deliver it.
It sounds like a nightmare, but it’s not a dream. It’s what your business reality would look and feel like without proper logistics.
The world-renowned entrepreneur, thought leader, and investor Tony Seba once said: “Logistics is the art of managing inventory in motion and at rest.”
This article will explore the top seven SaaS platforms to help your business with both.
Let’s dive in.
1. Warehouse management system (to keep the house in order)
With a Warehouse Management System (WMS), you’ll track your inventory like in a video game (in real-time). That elevates the accuracy of your enterprise to a whole new level. After all, it makes it easier to estimate your capacities and capabilities.
A good WMS can also improve the layout of your warehouse and provide you with a better workflow. You can better manage your inventory by organizing items according to a specific system. That makes it like a specialized workflow management solution for warehouses.
All you need to do is ensure the most in-demand items are accessible. This way, you’re not only saving space but working hours. Time is money.
The system automates your warehouse organization. Instead of waiting for the warehouse manager to give them an order, the system automatically scans the received item. It provides the crew with handling materials and the exact place to place them. That makes things far more reliable and reduces the risk of human error.
Integrating your warehouse management system with other platforms you use is also relatively easy. Remember, this is only one link to your logistics chain unless you’re in a warehouse business. You want all your systems to work in unison, and WMS exists with that in mind.
A good warehouse management system should help you handle employee theft. It’ll notify you when the inventory and the reports don’t align. These tools are more reliable and efficient than their human counterparts.
2. Inventory management system (for accurate planning, forecasting, and replenishment)
What’s the difference between an Inventory Management System (IMS) and a WMS? The most significant difference lies in the purpose of the tool.
As its name suggests, WMS aims to help you organize your warehouse. It’s there to help you use your space and help your warehouse staff navigate easily. Still, an inventory management system prioritizes your inventory’s effectiveness.
That means that aside from tracking your inventory in real-time (also done by WMS), it provides a real-time analysis on the parts of inventory management that need optimising.
How quickly are you depleting a particular item? How long do you expect it to last? When should you make a new order to make sure the next shipment arrives on time (before you’ve depleted your reserves)? These are only a few things you can use your IMS for.
You can also introduce the Product Information Management (PIM) software for better results.
Accurate planning requires a combination of tools. These include advanced business intelligence (BI) algorithms and reliable tracking software. A good IMS should represent both of these things in one.
IMS also helps you improve every single step of your order fulfillment process. You can improve everything from picking, packing, shipping, and delivering your items. Notice how we’ve started with picking, which is where the job of the WMS ends. That’s precisely why you should use these two tools in unison.
Manual inventory tracking is inherently problematic. With so many items belonging to different categories, vigilance over each item is necessary.
However, accomplishing this task is an immense challenge. If the influx of items exceeds their capabilities (which often occurs), even the most talented inventory manager will fail. That is why you have IMS.
3. Fleet management software (+ work order templates)
Fleet management software will guarantee that your trucks always find optimal routes. Because GPS tracks all your vehicles through satellites, a fleet management system can monitor road works, traffic, and other factors. That saves gas and time, as well as improves the reliability of your fleet.
For your fleet to be reliable, you must do everything by the book. Every decent fleet management software lets you download a work order template. That facilitates the process but also creates a reliable and uniform paper trail.
While you should always vet your drivers, you must also keep your finger on the pulse of your business. Part of that is keeping an eye on your staff without micromanaging.
That’s why fleet management software’s ability to recognize reckless driver behavior is so vital. It protects you against potential fines and damages. It also helps you uphold your moral responsibility to make sure your drivers don’t put the public at risk.
You can even assess the driver’s performance with the right tool, which can affect their evaluation score later.
Another bonus of a fleet management system is that it eliminates the risk of drivers stealing fuel. You can get gas use estimates based on the route and, via this sophisticated system, track gas use in real time.
One of the biggest factors in fleet management is maintenance. Fleet management systems enhance service scheduling, which enables you to maintain your trucks in optimal condition. This way, you improve performance and minimize downtime.
4. Insurance management system (including truckers’ insurance)
So far, we’ve covered warehouse, inventory, and fleet management. Protecting your assets requires warehouse, inventory, and fleet insurance.
General liability insurance provides only basic coverage. It’s there to cover the damage caused by you (products, employees, and your brand) to others, not the damage you or your business sustains. Review all your policies carefully and make sure you’re adequately covered.
You can keep all your policies from your warehouse insurance to truckers’ insurance in one place via a CMS platform or an Integrated Information Management System (IIMS) tool.
Handling multiple policies isn’t easy. But these tools simplify things for you and help you track the following:
- Policy details
- Renewal dates
- Coverage limits
That helps you keep up with all the policies and compliances and avoid a lapse in coverage.
You’ll also have an easier job controlling costs with the right management tool. By automating this process, you can make sure you never miss a cost-saving opportunity or a chance to negotiate a better deal.
There are many benefits to accessing real-time insurance data. By following these metrics, you can assess if you’re optimizing your insurance coverage.
The main reason 44% of small businesses in the US operate without insurance is the cost. Using tools to control costs will remove the greatest barrier to appropriate insurance coverage.
5. Supply chain analytics (for long-term business improvement)
You can only improve your business if you understand what you’re doing wrong and learn what you could do better. Using a supply chain analytics tool can help to achieve that.
However, to get these answers, you need vast data and a way to analyze them. With a supply chain analytics platform, you’ll interpret your logistics data more accurately. That’ll allow tweaking various parts of the process to achieve optimal accuracy.
This way, you’ll improve your decision-making and make it more data-driven. The biggest problem with most business operations is the need for more accurate assessments.
You may know your problems but lack the resources to solve them. Or, when forced to prioritize, you have no idea where to start.
Not all suppliers are equal. Sometimes, you’ll have to rank your strategic vendors. Knowing when to change a supplier is sometimes challenging.
In the face of a complicated task with an intimidating adjustment period, many managers would opt to remain with their current suppliers rather than go to the trouble of changing. However, when conducting a supplier performance analysis, the data collected can be too compelling to ignore.
The efficiency of your supply chain will also determine when your customers will get the products they’ve ordered. In other words, it directly affects your customer satisfaction.
An efficient supply chain should be both cost-effective and efficient. You’ll enhance it further by improving various process steps.
6. Barcode technology (to minimize the likelihood of human error)
A barcode system sends information about every item scanned into the cloud. The process is automatic, and there’s no chance of human error from mistyped code. Combined, this increases the efficiency of your system by a significant margin.
Via a SaaS barcode system linked to a cloud SaaS platform, you’ll have a much easier job tracing events in inventory management. Everything you scan leaves a digital fingerprint.
That makes error diagnostics more reliable and reduces the time it takes to recall faulty items. Using such a tool could protect your brand’s reputation in many ways.
These types of tools save a lot of time. Can you imagine having to manually enter the code? Of course not! It’d take forever, and nothing else would ever get accomplished.
Barcode technology makes this a seamless process. Due to the nature of barcodes, once you scan, the software immediately has all the necessary metrics.
You must make sure that the system is easy to integrate. When you scan the code, the system should upload it to your inventory management or warehouse management system. This way, you can streamline the entire system without room for error or delay.
Most importantly, this process is incredibly scalable. As your workload increases, you can integrate scanning technology with other departments to streamline other workflows.
7. Supply chain visibility platforms
These platforms allow you to GPS track items in your inventory. Some supply chains give access to the tracking of specific shipments to customers. This way, you increase trust and reduce the workload of your customer support.
A supply chain visibility platform is also invaluable to your customer support. This way, they can track all the shipments and answer questions regarding delays with certainty and accuracy. Since problem resolution is one of the most critical steps in improving customer experience, this can significantly help the efficiency of your logistics.
Remember that there’s sometimes a discrepancy between the supply and the demand caused by your logistics.
If you have the goods but can’t deliver them right away because your entire fleet is busy, that‘s a major problem. But you can alleviate it with supply chain visibility. This way, the situation becomes clear, and you can accurately assess your current capacity.
This SaaS service also offers some valuable analytical insights.
The right tools = more efficiency and a bigger impact
With the right set of platforms, you can increase the efficiency of your supply chain without buying more trucks or moving to a bigger warehouse.
You’ll use your resources better with the right set of SaaS platforms.
You’ll better understand how you and your team use your inventory and warehouse and how your fleet operates. These factors alone make all the difference in the world.