Introduction
Owing to the swift changes in the customer preferences, orders received by warehouse companies have gradually exhibited special characters, which include high product variety, minimizing the response time, and request for alterations after an order has been placed. Although the initial targets of the warehouse, such as warehouse utilization, and tight inventory control remain intact, they are subject to the particular, distinct preferences of diverse customers (Gu, Goetschalckx, & McGinnis, 2010).
Current Issues
The central operations which warehouses focus on are receiving arriving items from different suppliers, storage of the goods, receiving orders from clients, claiming the requested items, and packaging of the products for shipment. To achieve higher performance in regarding capacity of the warehouse, resources need to be carefully selected, operated, and coordinated. The study recognizes that the acquisition of warehouse management system is crucial since it provides, stores, and reports essential information to competently manage the flow of goods within the warehouse (Faber, de Koster, & van de VELDE, 2002).
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Intelligent Products in Warehouse Management System
The application of intelligence model in Warehouse Management System is yet to be studied. However, intelligence approach cannot be underestimated due to:
Partial information availability - every node involved in decision making contains part of the information used at arriving at some decisions due to uncertainty with the warehouse operation
Impracticality - although in some incidence, information required to make a decision is available, real constrictions such as time and cost hinders a centrally based solution.
The reasons mentioned above makes the centralized approach in WMS inefficient. However, exceptional products can be deployed in warehouse operations such as: receiving, storing, picking and shipping (Kim, Graves, Heragu, & Onge, 2002).
Scope
Challenges and opportunities for the organization
The specific business case provides an opportunity for the successful application of the product intelligence in the warehouse operations. Already availability of information system for identifying different products makes it easier for integration of the system.
The shifts in business environment imply that a centralized system may not be suitable for the needs of the company in future. Therefore, it is imperative to adopt a new system to capture the expanding customer base and growth in the products' capacity.
Increased number of customers impact in the warehouse. The model the business is using gives some levels of control of their operations to the customers. Therefore, higher customers may overload the system rendering it inefficient hence need for a more dynamic system to handle ever-changing.
Conclusion and Discussions
This study identifies crucial areas in warehouse operations that adoption of product intelligence model can benefit. Also, it points out opportunities and challenges for its implementation in the development of warehouse system in real-case scenarios. More precisely, illustrated on how useful product intelligence can be for arrangement and control of the storage location assignment and picking operations in the warehouse. Although no quantitative reports are available on the performance of that approach as compared to the initial centralized one, there is a belief that its impact can be substantial in cases of uncertainty containing high numbers of unpredictable events disturbing warehouse operations.
References
Faber, N., de Koster, R. M. B., & van de VELDE, S. L. (2002). Linking warehouse complexity to warehouse planning and control structure: an exploratory study of the use of warehouse management information systems. International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management , 32 (5), 381-395 .
Gu, J., Goetschalckx, M., & McGinnis, L. F. (2010). Research on warehouse design and performance evaluation: A comprehensive review. European Journal of Operational Research , 203 (3), 539-549.
Kim, B. I., Graves, R. J., Heragu, S. S., & Onge, A. S. (2002). Intelligent agent modeling of an industrial warehousing problem. Iie Transactions , 34 (7), 601-612.
