Case Study – Distribution Industries

About the client

One of the foremost distribution companies in the UAE, which offers top quality products that span different market segments like Food, Toys and Sports. Along with distribution, the client also provides concepts and solutions for Retailers across Category management and merchandising.

Problem Statement

As a distributor dealing with multiple segments, the client wanted a WMS which could cater to segregation of products at various levels. They required the WMS to ensure that certain products are restricted to certain zones, for example: Foods to be restricted to temperature-controlled zones. Apart from location management, the system had to take care of location suggestion and handling of periodic inventory reconciliation. They required the WMS to seamlessly integrate with their existing ERP. As they deal with Food, its primary requirement was to manage expiry information and ensure that earliest expiry stock is shipped out first.

Solution

PALMS helped the clients to configure different rules for different categories of items so that specific product could be stored in specific areas of the warehouse. This included soft reservation rules as well as restrictions (hard rules) which could not be violated. The system also offered a host of configurations to make location management easy and suggest locations during put-away. The guided put-away/picking option available in the HHT application of PALMS, helped improve the overall operational productivity during both put-away and picking process.

Built in inventory reconciliation options like stock count and cycle count helped the client automate their inventory reconciliation process. Options like blind count, reconciliation instruction based on stock movements (Last moved SKUs or locations) helped maintain accurate inventory levels. Stock discrepancies post inventory reconciliation was automatically calculated by PALMS and interfaced to client’s ERP. The intelligent allocation engine offered by PALMS ensured that the earliest expiry items were the first to ship out, thereby reducing inventory loss. PALMS also offered a built-in framework for seamlessly integrating with external systems on a real time basis, there by eliminating the need to manually maintain data in two different systems. This ensured inventory positions across both the systems were accurate.

PALMS has been successful in assisting the client with all their operational issues since past 5 years.