Introduction

The global warehouse management system market reached a valuation of $2.75 billion in 2022, with projections indicating a significant surge to $7.30 billion by 2030.

Understanding the challenges within Warehouse Management, we acknowledge the transformative potential of digital solutions. With over seven years of experience designing and developing WMS solutions tailored to diverse requirements, the Bloomteq team stands ready to guide and support industry players in enhancing their warehouse management operations.

What drives this escalating momentum within the warehouse management industry? Let's explore the pivotal factors shaping this landscape.

Key Drivers of Global Warehouse Management

1. E-commerce Expansion: The relentless growth of the e-commerce sector has sparked a surging demand for agile warehouse management systems capable of efficiently handling large volumes of online orders and managing intricate distribution networks.
2. Globalization of Supply Chains: The increasing globalization of supply chains necessitates sophisticated warehouse management practices that seamlessly navigate international logistics, intricate cross-border regulations, and the seamless movement of goods across diverse regions.
3. Technological Advancements: Rapid development of innovative technologies, including the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and automation, have catalyzed a transformative wave within warehouse management practices. Implementing these technologies revolutionized warehouse management practices, leading to enhanced operational efficiency, improved inventory accuracy, and streamlined supply chain processes.

Bridging the Technological Divide

The intersection of technology and the workforce often poses challenges, especially concerning adopting new systems among not tech-savvy people who usually work in warehouses. We successfully overcame this while working with one of our clients from the WMS industry, contributing to a remarkable success story. Their user-friendly software, featuring various user profiles (worker, driver, supervisor, manager, etc.), seamlessly guides every team member through daily tasks, ensuring minimal action is needed within the application.

Tech fact 1

This has been done via tenant management, with key features:

• Users of the WMS platforms were divided into different roles, some of which were predefined, but the admins could still edit or create new roles with custom permissions.
• Every company using the WMS has its own separate namespace, and it's impossible to mix data between companies.
• Alternatively, the WMS solution can be hosted on the company's infrastructure, providing 100% data ownership.

However, maintaining these systems poses another challenge, as provisioning the application and its updates over thousands of different devices and clients is incredibly hard to keep in sync. Our solution? Over-the-air updates - streamlining the process by implementing updates upon launch automatically, eliminating the need for users to take any action.

Tech fact 2

• This has been done utilizing React Native with CodePush Updates to get provisioned via an automated build pipeline.
• Every code push update goes through multiple testing stages before it reaches the end users.
• Every step of every stage is fully automated, providing very low friction and high velocity in development and testing.
• In the case that the update needs to be done to App Store or Play Store versions of the app, the soft and hard lockout functionalities were provided, either encouraging or forcing the users to do a manual update.

Addressing Connectivity Constraints

Acknowledging the limitations of internet accessibility in logistics and distribution, we implemented an offline mode for a client whose trains operated in remote rural areas of Slovenia. This ensured uninterrupted operations even in the absence of internet connectivity. Every action was stored offline and synchronized once internet access was restored.

Tech fact 3

• Every action the user makes within the app goes into a queue.
• The UI updates here are handled optimistically.
• If the app has internet connectivity, the items in the queue are synchronized to a message bus on the API, where they're reconciled and acted upon.
• If the app doesn't have internet connectivity, the users can still perform most of the actions as if they were online, and the first time the app gets online, the updates are dispatched to the message bus.
• For some operations (e.g., real-time inventory count), this is disabled because the order of operations, as well as updates to other users within the warehouse are critical for operation.

Empowering Operations with Real-time Inventory Accuracy

According to the research published by the retail analyst firm IHL Group, retailer warehouses worldwide lose a hefty $1 trillion annually due to the cost of overstock and out-of-stock events. This brings us to another critical aspect of warehouse management - ensuring real-time inventory accuracy. Our strategy for effective inventory tracking incorporates embedded systems and smart scanners, boosting real-time inventory accuracy to over 98%. Also, stock-in and stock-out modules effectively minimize losses due to inventory discrepancies and ease receiving flow, put away, picking flow, cycle count, and inventory management. We are utilizing the industry standard flows in these processes, such as informed and uninformed cycle counts or tracking and logging all user interactions within the warehouse.

Optimizing Warehouse Efficiency

Operational warehouse costs are the subject of significant optimizations. The complexity associated with managing a diverse workforce and costly equipment within expansive warehouse spaces is known only to WHM industry professionals. One of the solutions we developed involves introducing smart routing within the application. This has led to increased worker productivity and decreased labor costs that could account for up to 65% of the total warehouse budget.

Tech fact 4

• This is achieved by allowing the admins to map out their warehouse layout in the system, defining where each location, shelf and bin are stationed, as well as the paths between them.
• Using a variation of Dijkstra's algorithm, or A* algorithm, during directed operations, the user's route is mapped to find the optimal path and order of operations, eliminating unnecessary trips through large warehouses (think of how GPS works).

Streamlining Processes and Reducing Paperwork

Moreover, the enduring paperwork challenge within warehouse operations remains a persistent hurdle. Our experience with the tire supply chain system demonstrated the effectiveness of automated receiving flow, with end-to-end integration from the POS system, automated orders from suppliers, automated stock-in module, and finally, getting the items to the users via the automated stock-out module. This results in streamlined backend operations and the elimination of the need for manual order creation, effectively saving valuable time and space.

Tech fact 5

• Since all of the data in the warehouse is digitalized, most of the backend operations can be automated, which ranges from automatically assigning orders to users to connecting printers and printing labels and QR codes.

Not following item storing rules is costly

Very few professionals out of the industry are aware of how important it is to place warehouse items in accordance with internal rules and regulations. For example, the software can help management ensure that the same shelf does not contain two identical products with different expiration dates or two different car tires with different DOTs by setting storing rules management on the line item level. If this rule is not being respected, there is a risk of a penalty fee. This kind of cost occurs due to the lack of organization automation and can be easily avoided by streamlined directives via the application.

Tech fact 6

• Whenever an item is defined in a warehouse, a set of rules for its storage needs to be applied.
• With this, we generate "templates" for different items to easily create multiple product variations.
• For every location in the app, we can define its storage properties, which are the items it can hold.
• When handling flows like putaway or inventory management, the rulesets are compared, and the application users will be automatically blocked if they attempt to store an item in a location that doesn't support its rules.

Embracing Digital Transformation

Understanding the challenges within Warehouse Management, we acknowledge the transformative potential of digital solutions. With over seven years of experience designing and developing WMS solutions tailored to diverse requirements, we stand ready to guide and support industry players in enhancing their warehouse management operations.

Application and infrastructure setup

Our products are based on mature development frameworks which are stable and very reliable. In most cases, for warehouse management systems, we run an API server with iOS and Android applications for warehouse workers and a web application for warehouse managers.

Our setup usually consists of:

• NodeJS (NestJS), Python (Django) or Rust (Rocket) API built as Docker images, depending on the client's needs and the use case.
• PostgreSQL as the main database provider.
• Depending on the use case and requirements, instead of PostgreSQL, we would use InfluxDB, ScyllaDB, DynamoDB or AWS Redshift (or similar solutions from the other two main cloud providers).
• ReactJS or AngularJS for the warehouse manager web app.
• React Native or Swift/Kotlin for iOS and Android applications.
• Apache Kafka, AWS SQS, or RabbitMQ for handling the message bus and communication between different services.
• Kubernetes or AWS ECS for provisioning Docker containers.
• GitHub Actions, CircleCI or CodeMagic are used to handle automated pipelines.

This is a significant simplification of our setup, and every solution receives a very critical approach, where we are working on fitting a solution to a product instead of it being the other way around.