During the recent dozen of years the greatest change in the Polish warehouses consists in a complete elimination of paper picking lists and implementation of IT solutions interfaced with each other using a radio system.
The requirement of a continuous improvement in efficiency of warehouse works involved the necessity to resign from paper documents as they were ineffective. The impossibility to make real time changes resulted in a significant extension of the time needed to carry out warehouse stocktaking. It also resulted in a significant number of mistakes.
The evolution of warehouse systems during the recent years has been accelerated, in particular, by increasingly more expensive labour. This requires an increase in the efficiency of the WMS, which actively optimises warehouse processes. Due to an increasingly greater participation of automatics, an enterprise is able to reduce the number of warehouse employees, which contributes to a reduction in costs. Furthermore, it is notable that enterprises increasingly more often invest in modern technologies to support WMS management which were very expensive and virtually unavailable in the Polish market several years ago. The said technologies include, among others, forklift terminals, which are more advanced than manual terminals, voicepicking, i.e. voice solutions applied at places where manual terminals would be difficult to handle (e.g. in cold stores, due to the necessity to wear thick gloves), as well as RFID, or visual technologies increasing the control of warehouse stocks.
Another factor includes the growing competition among distribution companies, which begin to notice the potential to make facilitations to the warehouse management. Efficient logistics become increasingly more often a source of competitive advantage. The development of WMS solutions must be accompanied by a greater focus on efficiency and reliability of warehouse processes.
Furthermore, WMS should face the increasingly larger number of indices stored and the changing structure of shipments, which have become fragmented now. The necessity to reduce costs does not enable the enterprises to keep the stocks in a warehouse which needs more advanced stock management processes. Another factor that has determined the current form of WMS systems includes the necessity to make labels compliant with the international standard GS1.
In recapitulation, like the entire warehouse market, WMS has become increasingly more mature. In the past, companies supplying solutions for warehouse management tailored applications to the customers’ individual needs, which was extremely time-consuming and generated quite a lot of mistakes. Such solution was developed in that its functionality was extended from the viewpoint of temporary needs of another customer which prevented a comprehensive evolution of WMS-like systems. Today, the companies implementing mature Warehouse Management System solutions ensure supply and configuration of a ready-made, fully operative product which, due to its modular construction, may be tailored to individual needs of an enterprise.