From Data to Action: The Role of Real-Time Visibility in Warehouse Efficiency

Real-time data and visibility tools enable warehouses to respond quickly to operational challenges, improving overall warehouse efficiency and minimizing downtime. But what types of data do these tools need to include for the best results? And how should an organization get started in data-driven warehousing?

These are the questions we’ll be addressing in this article, as well as highlighting some of the key benefits and outcomes that real-time visibility in the supply chain can bring.

For additional context and real-world examples of warehouse optimization in action, be sure to also watch AutoScheduler’s recent webinar with Peter Hall, Warehouse Orchestration Senior Manager at PepsiCo.

What is real-time data visibility in a warehouse setting?

Real-time data visibility is a warehouse optimization strategy that helps streamline warehouse operations to maximize productivity and efficiency. It tells warehouse teams the next best action to take to meet or exceed each day’s list of tasks.

Real-time data visibility starts with data consolidation, analysis, and interpretation — bringing all the right information together, figuring out what it means, then deciding what to do next.

Performing these steps manually is a task that warehouse operation teams have struggled with for decades. Data sources are usually siloed and analysis models are often incomplete or antiquated, leaving the data interpretation and decision-making inevitably flawed.

For these reasons, organizations are increasingly turning to warehouse efficiency and orchestration tools such as what AutoScheduler.AI offers to enable their teams to quickly adapt to the many changing variables in the warehouse environment.

Access to this type of centralized warehouse orchestration layer provides operators with a more comprehensive view of their warehouse operations. Plus, managers gain more transparency into their facility’s inventory status, labor allocation, equipment usage, and order progress.

What data do you need to consolidate for warehouse optimization?

To achieve real-time visibility in the supply chain and improve warehouse efficiency, it’s important to first bring together all of the various data streams related to warehouse operations. This typically includes data from Warehouse Management Systems (WMS), Labor Management Systems (LMS), and Yard Management Systems (YMS).

A helpful exercise can be to think through all of the questions your warehouse teams need to answer throughout their workday, and then make sure all of the data sources needed to answer those questions are consolidated in one place. Some examples of these types of questions include:

• What inventory do we have right now? Where is that inventory in the warehouse?
• What new inventory is coming in? When is it planned to arrive?
• What do we need to ship out? When do we need to ship it?
• What does our production schedule look like? What lines are running, and when?
• What trailers are in the yard right now? Do we need to unload one before we can fill up another?

“Data is at the core of everything we’re doing. Before making any move, we ask, ‘Do we have all the data we need? Is it accurate? Where are the gaps?’ That’s become the essential starting point.”

Peter Hall - Warehouse Orchestration Senior Manager, PepsiCo

What are the benefits of real-time visibility for warehouse efficiency?

As we discussed in a previous post on warehouse orchestration, this data-driven strategy can be a game-changer in terms of driving better decision-making, increasing productivity, and reducing costs across the warehouse workflow. But what additional benefits does the real-time data element provide — for example, having warehouse teams review the data insights and recommended actions hourly versus daily?

Clear direction

The real-time data insights provided by a warehouse orchestration layer take the heavy-lifting or guesswork out of warehouse operations. By having an intelligent system that understands all the variables and has performed the detailed analysis for you, warehouse teams know exactly what action to take next versus having to figure it out for themselves.

Not only does this make each day less stressful for warehouse workers, it also means greater warehouse efficiency for manufacturers and operators.

Schedule optimization

With real-time data updates and forecasting intelligence, a warehouse’s shipping and receiving schedule can be adjusted on-the-fly to improve yard operations and minimize delays.

For example, let’s say that a load for tomorrow has a 12pm dispatch time, but based on the latest production schedule the real-time data tool has determined that production of the shipment’s inventory won’t finish until 3pm. Could that appointment proactively be moved to 4pm or 5pm to give the warehouse team extra leeway?

Similarly, if the orchestration tool detects that a particular shipment will be ready a day early, the on-site team could explore moving up its pick-up appointment to make room in the warehouse for other shipments.

Proactive communication

An optimized warehouse schedule provides opportunities for strengthened relationships with carriers and other partners, as well as further establishing a reputation in the industry of being an organized and timely facility.

With real-time visibility in the supply chain, shippers can start to communicate more proactively with freight carriers, providing more accurate pick-up times and shipment status updates based on the current flow within the facility. This comes with the added benefits of cutting down on detention costs and yard congestion.

These real-time data insights also have a positive impact on internal communication, enabling greater transparency and awareness across the rest of the organization’s supply chain.

Focus on long-term improvement

With day-to-day warehouse optimization taken care of by a tool such as AutoScheduler’s platform, operations teams no longer need to spend the bulk of their time figuring out what their issues are — the data tells them what their issues are, and accounts for those issues each day in the next-best-action recommendations.

Instead, management can now dedicate more time to performing root cause analysis to find and fix what’s causing the known issues that repeatedly pop up, and even brainstorm new ideas to further bolster the organization’s data-driven warehousing program. This renewed focus on ongoing operational improvement is not only a better use of their time, it also contributes to even greater warehouse efficiency as broader problems and bottlenecks get resolved.

How to get started with data-driven warehousing?

If your organization is ready to take your warehouse efficiency to the next level with real-time data visibility, these are the core next steps for your data transformation journey:

1. Consolidate the data: Disjointed data streams will never yield optimal results. Focus first on bringing together all the important data from your WMS, LMS, YMS, and other operational systems. 
   This is most easily achieved with a warehouse orchestration tool like the platform from AutoScheduler.
2. Analyze the data: With all data sources in one place, you’re now in a good position to calculate your organization’s important KPIs to assess the current state of daily warehouse operations and identify weak points.
3. Interpret the data: Determining what to do next based on what the data is telling you is often the trickiest part. Warehouse orchestration layers typically leverage AI to forecast and recommend upcoming actions based on historical data and the current state of operations. Whichever approach you take, this step needs to be as clear and simple as possible, providing prescriptive actions for warehouse teams to take next.

An effective warehouse optimization strategy relies on real-time visibility in the supply chain to quickly adapt to operational challenges and improve overall site efficiency, productivity, and communication.