DC Velocity - March 2015

38 DC VELOCITY MARCH 2015 www.dcvelocity.com strategicinsight BY SUSAN LACEFIELD, EDITOR AT LARGE

HARNESSING MOBILE TECHNOLOGY

INVENTORY ACCURACY HAS ALWAYS BEEN CRITical to the smooth operation of a distribution center. Without reliable and up-to-date information, DCs face significant hurdles in their quest to fill orders swiftly and accurately, or achieve much success with their demand planning.

Lately, however, inventory accuracy has been receiving even more attention than usual. Both the move toward omnichannel retailing and an upsurge in regulations mandating that companies be able to track and trace their products (particularly in the food and drug industries) have raised the stakes where inventory accuracy is concerned. Sound real-time inventory data are also necessary for the effective functioning of programs like Lean or just-in-time production and for meeting ever-mounting demands to ship product faster. “It all puts a premium on inventory accuracy and inventory control practices,” says Mark Wheeler, director of supply chain solutions for the mobile technology company Zebra Technologies.

As a result, there has been a renewed interest among companies in improving their process for counting inventory, the most common of which is inventory cycle counting. (For more on cycle counting, see the sidebar “Cycle Counting 101.”) A 2013 study by Motorola (now part of Zebra Technologies), Warehouse of the Future, showed that 41 percent of warehouses use manual cycle counting to keep track of inventory levels. But that method can be slow, labor-intensive, and inaccurate.

One way around that is to conduct cycle counts using
mobile technology, such as bar-code scanners, handheld
computers, and voice systems. Just under one-third ( 32
percent) of the warehouses in Motorola’s study were using
real-time warehouse management system (WMS)-enabled
mobile devices for that purpose. However, the number of
users is expected to soar; the white paper predicts a “seismic
shift” to automated and mechanized inventory solutions in
the next few years.

BENEFITS OF GOING MOBILE

Those predictions of a seismic shift are not surprising, as the benefits of using mobile devices for cycle counting are many. Consider just a few:

1. Inventory information can be updated in real time. When cycle counts are performed manually with paper, the information is updated in the system in batches. “Any accuracies that you may gain are after the fact,” says Bruce Stubbs, director of industry marketing at Honeywell Scanning and Mobility. Mobile technology, however, allows inventory information in the WMS or warehouse execution system (WES) to be updated immediately, enabling operations to be adjusted accordingly. “With mobile technology, you can make corrections right there at the pick face or inventory face so operations can continue with an understanding of