...........................8Introduction:A management team that has been through the pain and aggravation of implementing a warehouse management system (WMS) understands the pressures involved in the installation. There are numerous deadlines that must be met and potential show stoppers are encountered almost daily. These must be resolved before proceeding to the next step.In June of this year, our primary warehouse in the United States implemented an SAP Warehouse Management System (WMS) in the finished goods storage area. This report addresses the successes and failures encountered during the course of the implementation and for the first three months afterwards.Background Information:Though operating with the SAP R/3 system, the current process of order fulfillment was paper based; After a customer order had been entered into our operating system and transmitted by our national call center, warehouse office personnel would print out a pick ticket and hand over to the warehouse order picker for picking and shipment processing. Once the order had been prepared for shipment, the paperwork was returned to the office personnel who would then complete the Bill of Lading and arrange transportation. This was a process that had been in place since computers were introduced in the early 1980’s. And though functional, major problems were occurring on a daily basis. Picking errors were a primary concern as order accuracy averaged between 60% and 90% on a monthly basis. Inventory accuracy was also a concern. The act of conducting a physical inventory occurs once per year and the results of their last count in 2000 was less than 20% accuracy. And as a result of prior project, the warehouse had also reduced head count from 26 in 1999 to 19 as of January of this year. All of these factors contributed to customer dissatisfaction. Customer orders were routinely delayed during periods of high order activity and when they did arriv...
