WMS reporting
WMS reporting is what your warehouse management system tells you from the work it records: orders, picks, receipts, stock moves and locations. It reports well on that work, though not on the work that never reaches it. That's why the questions a warehouse gets run on, about service, people, stock and margin, are hard to answer from it alone.
Each of those questions has a page of its own.
What can't WMS reporting show you?
Anything the system wasn't asked to record. Replenishment done without a scan, housekeeping, training and the time between tasks rarely reach it, so a busy shift can read as a quiet one. Nor does it hold the whole story, since the clocking records, the promise on each order and each client's contract usually sit somewhere else.
None of that is a fault in the WMS. Most were set up at go-live to run the warehouse rather than to explain it. The standard reports are written for every warehouse that runs the system rather than for yours. They can't know the service level on each kind of order or how your shifts are set up.
Fettle takes those rules in during the first week on site, then reads the WMS and your other systems as they stand. Supervisors log the work the WMS never records, so an hour spent unloading a lorry stops looking like an hour stood still.
Warehouse management system (WMS)
A warehouse management system, or WMS, is the software that tells people where to receive, put away, replenish and pick stock, then records each task as it's done.
Off-system work
Off-system work is the work people do in the hours they're paid for that never reaches the WMS as a recorded task.
What leaving it out does to a utilisation figure is covered under warehouse productivity.
Why doesn't our warehouse dashboard say what to focus on?
Because most dashboards show what happened, one measure to a tile, leaving you to work out which one matters today and why. Built on the same records as the WMS, they carry the same gaps. What a manager wants in the morning is the one thing that needs attention, with the evidence underneath it, rather than a screen of tiles.
A screen also has to be trusted. A green figure that hides one red customer, or a number that needs a caveat before anybody acts on it, soon has people checking everything by hand.
Command view
The command view is the screen that says what needs attention today, before anybody opens a dashboard.
In Fettle it sets out the priorities for your role at warehouse, client or section level. Every number on it opens into the evidence underneath, down to the shift and the person it came from, so it can be checked before anybody acts on it.
What is warehouse analytics?
In warehouse operations, warehouse analytics means reading what the WMS, the clocking system and the rest record, joined up and checked, to show where people's time, the stock and the service are going. It isn't the data warehouse kind, which is about databases. The useful sort answers a manager's question the same morning rather than in next month's report.
A lot of the time in warehouse reporting goes before anybody reads a number: exporting from each system, getting the figures to agree and adding the caveats. The weekly, monthly and quarterly packs for clients are often built that way, by hand.
Fettle is decision support, insight before action. It reads the systems you already run without replacing any of them, then shows what needs attention today, before anybody changes a thing.
What the reports never showed
65%
Labour utilisation once the off-system work was counted, in two warehouses that read around 42% on their systems alone
Two warehouses we've worked in
572 hours in one week sat between operators clocking on and starting their first task, time no report ever showed
Eight sets of brake pads sat in a full pallet location for 223 days, in the wrong place and unnoticed
See the command view set up for a warehouse like yours
The demo takes about an hour and is set up for the kind of warehouse you run. It can start from whichever question your reports can't answer today.
Book a demo