Advance your Warehousing

TLDR of this Webinar

Run smarter with warehouse workflow automation

Learn how to automate your warehouse workflows, and how our warehouse management apps can help you run smarter. Join us in this free webinar to get some tips from the experts in how best to manage your warehouse with TradeGecko.

Transcript of the webinar:

Hi, thanks for joining us today.

My name is Kishan, and I’m one of the account managers here at TradeGecko.

I’m joined today by my good friend Richard who is also part of the Account Management team.

We are here to take you through a high level demo of how our Advanced Warehousing features work, and what they can do for you and your business.. The demo will last around 20 minutes.

At the end of this webinar we’ll be taking some questions - so please add any questions you have to the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen.

Alternatively, If you want to have a more tailored and personal demo, just type “Contact me” with your email address in our Q&A, and we’ll have your Account Manager reach out to you.

So I will be giving you a high level overview of three key features, I’ll  walk you through how they could make your warehouse workflows more efficient, and then I’ll also run you all through a demo so you can get a good grasp on all the features. 

Intro: 

Let’s begin with what Advanced Warehousing actually is. Base level warehouse management is about core inventory functions, and primarily manual operations.  Advanced Warehousing  is about the optimization of processes, and automation to make your operations more efficient.

TradeGecko’s Advanced Warehousing functionality is provided through a combination of the Stock Receiving app, Bin Locations, Pick Pack app, and a series of Automation workflow templates. These features will help you streamline and automate your warehouse workflows - thus reducing manual errors.

Here are some common issues that we get from our customers who use manual workflows for fulfillment and managing their warehouse:

1. Duplication of data entry (This is by far the biggest problem that our customers face by implementing manual workflows)
2. Inconsistency in data entry and miskeying information. (If we’re doing things manually, margin of errors will increase dramatically)
3. Time consuming (As we have to double check things all the time just to make sure we haven’t made an error, manual workflows could be pretty time consuming )
4. Large ongoing staff training cost (Manual process is inefficient comparatively which could definitely result in added training cost)

Let’s just see what Stock Receiving app actually is and see how barcodes can help streamline our workflows.

Our Stock Receiving app is a web-based application that helps your warehouse managers to receive stock easily with a barcode scanner. It offers a simple user interface that improves warehouse management and efficiency in stock control - and you can even use this app on an iPad too.

Here are a couple of examples of how you could use the stock receiving app:

1. Receive Purchase Orders through barcodes. Typically you count the inventory manually when receiving a PO, however with this app, you just have to scan the barcode on the PO and start scanning the items and once done just click ok and save it. Once you’ve saved it, your PO will be updated automatically.
2. Do a Stock take Often excel spreadsheets are used to do stocktake. However, with this app, we can now use a barcode scanner instead. All we need to do is scan our products and when done, just click ok and save. Once you’ve saved it, your stocktake will be updated. This will take well under half the time of conducting a manual stocktake using spreadsheets.

Now we move on to Bin Locations:

A bin location is a designated inventory storage location. This ensures that the warehouse becomes more accessible, inventory items are easy to locate with less time and effort.

Many times we see customers with large and multiple warehouses trying to fulfill orders with no set location assigned for that product in that particular warehouse. 

With this feature we are able to organize our products in each warehouse according to row, shelf, and bin with the bin number reflecting all three attributes.

In other words, Bin Location acts like a GPS for your products in their assigned warehouse.

Our PickPack app allows warehouse teams to streamline their fulfillment workflows, providing easy access to pending orders that need to be assembled for fulfillment. The app displays the bin location of your products allowing your warehouse team to easily locate the items within your warehouse for a seamless pick and pack process.

In other words, instead of fulfilling the orders manually, we now have a technology in place that will guide through picking the products in the warehouse and fulfilling it.

Alright. Now let me go ahead and walk you through a few demos which will certainly help you understand how this feature works and how it can streamline your warehouse operations.

Stock Receiving app

Here are 2 things that are super important before we start using the stock receiving app:

1. Assign barcodes to all the products (We can do that in app or we can do it via CSV)
2. Make sure you give the permission to the system to display barcodes on a PO (We can do that via Branding and document’s tab)

Let me just show you a preview of how a Purchase Order would look like with a barcode on it.

These are the things that we could go ahead and do with our Stock Receiving App:

1. Receive Purchase Orders through barcodes. (Go to Stock receiving app = scan the PO and receive it)
2. Do a Stock take (Go to Stock Control = Stock take = Perform a stocktake)

Bin Locations: You can add Bin Locations individually or Bulk manage the process.

Individually: All we need to do is go the variants section = select the stock locations tab = update the Bin Location

Bulk Manage: We can go to Settings = Company Details = Locations = Import/Export Stock Location Data.

Once we’ve updated the Bin Locations for all the variants, you’ll see the locations of these variants on the pickpack app while fulfilling the sales orders. This workflow will certainly help save that extra time that we always spend searching for the items.

PickPack app:

In order to access the pickpack app, we need to go to “browse apps’ section = In the search bar just type pickpack = install the app = authorize it and we’re good to go.

In order to start using the pickpack app, we’d need to open the app, select a warehouse = select the orders we’d like to pick = create a pick list  = scan the products = once done please confirm the changes. 

Now we have to pack the orders. In order to pack the orders, just go to “To pack” tab and select the SO = Scan the products and confirm the changes. 

To confirm if the order is packed, we can go into that SO = Go into Shipments = You will see “Packed” next to the Shipment.

Once done, we can go to that SO and mark the SO as shipped if we’ve already shipped that SO. 

TradeGecko Automation 

I also wanted to highlight that we have a number of Automation workflow templates available that can further reduce the time you and your team spend on warehouse management. Our Automation workflow templates can be found under sales orders tab in app.

Now here are a few automation workflow templates that we could use to streamline the process

• Automate the task of Partially Packing a Sales Order in the default Stock Location due to unavailable stock and then re-route the Order to complete fulfillment from a secondary location.
• Assign Orders from certain Sales Channels to specific Stock Locations based on the customer's region.
• Automatically check if there is enough stock to fulfill the order, and if not then re- route the order to a backup stock location.

All plans include 3 free workflows, so why don’t get started today.

Our Advanced Warehousing Apps are available for all customers on a Business plan or above, however they can be accessed for an add-on price of $125/Month. We will also include 2 hours of setup assistance free of charge.

Thanks so much for joining us, and we wish you and your business all the very best during these times. Please feel free to contact us at success@tradegecko.com with any questions.