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Improve Your Warehouse Management

Your 6-step guide to optimize Körber WMS operations.
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Improve Your Warehouse Management
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Optimize Warehouse Management with Körber WMS for Peak Efficiency

Effectively managing warehouse operations can be complex, often leading to hidden inefficiencies and missed compliance targets. Our platform helps you pinpoint exact bottlenecks and optimize resource utilization. It ensures smooth material flow, transforming your operations into a highly efficient and accurate process.

Download our pre-configured data template and address common challenges to reach your efficiency goals. Follow our six-step improvement plan and consult the Data Template Guide to transform your operations.

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Why Optimize Warehouse Management in Körber WMS?

Efficient warehouse management is the backbone of successful supply chain operations. In today's fast-paced market, any inefficiency within your warehouse can ripple through the entire business, leading to increased operational costs, missed delivery deadlines, and ultimately, dissatisfied customers. Even with a powerful system like Körber WMS, complexities arise from managing vast inventories, diverse product types, and intricate material flows. Manual reporting and traditional analytics often provide only a static snapshot, failing to reveal the true, dynamic behavior of your warehouse processes. This lack of transparency can hide critical bottlenecks, leading to suboptimal resource allocation, extended cycle times, and a constant struggle to meet service level agreements.

Optimizing your Warehouse Management, especially within the Körber WMS environment, is not just about cutting costs, it is about enhancing agility, accuracy, and overall customer satisfaction. Understanding the complete journey of every warehouse order, from its creation to its final shipment, is paramount. Without this end-to-end visibility, efforts to improve efficiency can be misdirected, potentially solving symptoms rather than root causes.

How Process Mining Transforms Körber WMS Analysis

Process mining offers a revolutionary approach to understanding and improving your Warehouse Management operations by providing an X-ray view into your Körber WMS data. Instead of relying on assumptions or aggregated reports, process mining reconstructs every single process instance based on your system's event logs. For each Warehouse Order, it meticulously traces activities like "Warehouse Order Created," "Inbound Delivery Notification Received," "Goods Arrived at Dock," "Goods Received and Counted," "Quality Inspection Performed," "Putaway Task Created," "Goods Put Away in Storage," "Picking Task Created," "Goods Picked from Storage," "Packing Initiated," "Goods Packed," "Staging for Shipment," "Loading onto Carrier," and "Shipment Dispatched," all the way to "Warehouse Order Completed." This granular view allows you to see the actual paths taken by your orders, rather than just the planned ones.

This powerful analytical capability helps you visualize bottlenecks in material flow, identify deviations from standard operating procedures, and quantify the impact of specific activities on your overall cycle time. By leveraging your Körber WMS data, process mining moves beyond mere reporting, offering actionable insights into complex process patterns and variations that are invisible to the naked eye. This is crucial for how to improve Warehouse Management effectiveness.

Key Improvement Areas and Insights

With process mining, you can pinpoint exactly where your Körber WMS processes are underperforming. You might discover:

  • Putaway Bottlenecks: Uncover delays between "Goods Received and Counted" and "Goods Put Away in Storage," indicating issues with resource availability, storage location allocation, or task prioritization.
  • Picking Inefficiencies: Identify suboptimal picking routes or excessive travel times, suggesting opportunities to optimize warehouse layout or picking strategies. You can also analyze variations in "Goods Picked from Storage" based on different operator IDs or equipment used.
  • Packing and Staging Delays: Detect prolonged waiting times between "Goods Packed" and "Staging for Shipment," highlighting capacity constraints or coordination issues in the packing and staging areas.
  • Rework and Non-Compliance: Visualize instances where orders deviate from the ideal path, such as additional quality checks or re-packaging, indicating potential issues in previous steps or a lack of compliance.

By focusing on these areas, you gain clear, data-driven insights into how to reduce Warehouse Management cycle time, optimize resource utilization, and eliminate non-value-added activities within your Körber WMS environment.

Expected Outcomes and Measurable Benefits

Implementing process optimization strategies informed by process mining in your Körber WMS can yield significant and measurable benefits:

  • Reduced Operational Costs: By eliminating waste, optimizing resource allocation, and streamlining processes, you can achieve substantial cost savings in labor, equipment, and inventory management.
  • Faster Order Fulfillment: Identify and remove bottlenecks, shortening the end-to-end cycle time for warehouse orders, leading to quicker deliveries and improved customer satisfaction.
  • Enhanced Accuracy and Compliance: Gain insights into process deviations and ensure adherence to standard operating procedures and service level agreements, minimizing errors and improving overall data quality.
  • Optimized Resource Utilization: Better understand how your human resources and equipment are being used, allowing for more effective scheduling and deployment.
  • Improved Decision-Making: Move beyond anecdotal evidence to make data-driven decisions that lead to sustainable process improvements and a more agile supply chain.

Getting Started with Warehouse Optimization

Unlock the full potential of your Körber WMS operations. By applying process mining, you can transform your Warehouse Management from a reactive system to a proactive, highly efficient, and accurate operation. Empower your team with the insights needed to continuously optimize processes, reduce costs, and deliver exceptional service, making your warehouse a true competitive advantage.

Warehouse Management Logistics Inventory Optimization Order Fulfillment Supply Chain Material Flow Operational Efficiency Compliance Warehouse Manager

Common Problems & Challenges

Identify which challenges are impacting you

Extended waiting times for inbound deliveries at the dock or during counting significantly delay subsequent putaway tasks, creating congestion and impacting overall material flow in Warehouse Management. This ripple effect can lead to missed production schedules or customer commitments, increasing operational costs within Körber WMS.ProcessMind identifies the precise choke points causing these delays, pinpointing specific arrival times, resource availability, or quality inspection queues that extend the goods receipt process. Our analysis helps optimize scheduling and resource allocation to streamline inbound operations.

Suboptimal putaway decisions lead to goods being stored in non-ideal locations, increasing travel times for picking and potentially wasting valuable warehouse space. This inefficiency can inflate labor costs and extend order fulfillment cycles, reducing overall productivity within your Warehouse Management operations.ProcessMind analyzes actual putaway paths and storage locations against planned strategies, identifying deviations and their impact on subsequent picking activities in Körber WMS. We reveal opportunities for optimizing storage logic and putaway task assignment to improve space utilization and reduce travel time.

Frequent picking errors, such as incorrect items or quantities, directly lead to increased returns, customer complaints, and costly rework processes. These inaccuracies undermine inventory integrity and necessitate additional quality checks, slowing down the entire fulfillment process and impacting profitability in Warehouse Management.ProcessMind maps out every picking task and subsequent activities, highlighting instances where goods picked do not match planned quantities or materials. This insight helps identify root causes, such as specific operators, equipment, or storage locations contributing to errors in Körber WMS, enabling targeted training or process adjustments.

Congestion at packing stations creates significant delays in the final stages of order fulfillment, leading to late shipments and potential breaches of service level agreements. This impacts customer satisfaction and can result in expedited shipping costs to compensate for lost time in Warehouse Management.ProcessMind visualizes the flow through packing stations, identifying queues, resource limitations, or sequential dependencies that extend packing times. Our analysis helps optimize station layouts, resource allocation, and task sequencing to ensure a smooth transition from picking to dispatch in Körber WMS.

Extended end-to-end cycle times for warehouse orders, from creation to dispatch, indicate inefficiencies across multiple stages, leading to customer dissatisfaction and lost business. These prolonged durations hide critical delays in various activities, making it difficult to pinpoint improvement areas within Warehouse Management.ProcessMind provides a comprehensive view of the entire Warehouse Order lifecycle, exposing the average and outlier durations for each process step. By analyzing the flow in Körber WMS, we identify specific activities or paths that contribute most significantly to overall lead time, allowing for targeted optimization.

Unsanctioned variations in standard operating procedures lead to inconsistent performance, increased errors, and compliance risks across warehouse operations. These deviations make it challenging to maintain quality standards and predict outcomes, impacting the reliability of Warehouse Management processes.ProcessMind automatically discovers all actual process paths taken by warehouse orders, revealing where and how the process diverges from the defined standard within Körber WMS. This visibility allows organizations to identify unauthorized workarounds, enforce best practices, and reduce operational variability.

Inefficient allocation or underutilization of warehouse staff, equipment, or storage space leads to inflated operational costs and reduced throughput. This often results from imbalanced workloads, inadequate planning, or manual processes that fail to adapt to fluctuating demand in Warehouse Management.ProcessMind analyzes the involvement of specific users, equipment, and storage locations across all activities for each Warehouse Order, identifying where resources are over or underutilized. By revealing actual usage patterns in Körber WMS, our solution helps optimize workforce scheduling, equipment deployment, and capacity planning.

Discrepancies between physical inventory and system records cause stockouts, overselling, and delays in order fulfillment, leading to significant financial losses and customer dissatisfaction. These inaccuracies often stem from poor goods receipt, putaway, or picking processes, creating a ripple effect throughout Warehouse Management.ProcessMind traces every movement and quantity change for materials through the warehouse order lifecycle, highlighting points where planned and actual quantities diverge. This detailed analysis in Körber WMS helps identify specific activities or operator behaviors contributing to inventory discrepancies, improving data integrity.

Delays in quality inspection processes can significantly hold up goods from being put away and made available for customer orders. This not only impacts inbound efficiency but can also cause a cascade of delays across the entire order fulfillment cycle, increasing holding costs in Warehouse Management.ProcessMind analyzes the duration and frequency of goods undergoing quality inspection, identifying specific points where tasks get stalled or resources are overloaded. By mapping the inspection process in Körber WMS, we help optimize staffing, equipment, and workflow to ensure timely release of goods.

Frequent need for expedited shipping indicates underlying inefficiencies in the warehouse's order fulfillment process, driven by late picking, packing, or staging. These additional costs erode profit margins and reflect a failure to meet standard delivery timelines, impacting the overall financial health of Warehouse Management.ProcessMind tracks the entire order journey from creation to dispatch, identifying orders that consistently require accelerated processing or late-stage interventions. By analyzing cycle times and activity durations in Körber WMS, we pinpoint the root causes of delays that necessitate costly expedited shipping, enabling proactive process improvements.

Inefficient use of storage locations, such as overcrowding or underutilization of specific zones, leads to increased search times, longer travel distances, and potential damage to goods. This directly impacts putaway efficiency and picking speed, raising operational costs in Warehouse Management.ProcessMind maps the actual usage patterns of various storage locations and analyzes material flow, revealing underutilized areas or congested zones. This insight, derived from your Körber WMS data, helps optimize warehouse layout, slotting strategies, and putaway logic for better space management.

Typical Goals

Define what success looks like

This goal aims to significantly shorten the duration from when goods arrive at your dock until they are fully received and put away within Körber WMS. Achieving this reduces delays in material availability, improves inventory accuracy, and ensures that products are ready for order fulfillment much faster, directly enhancing overall warehouse throughput and operational efficiency.

Optimizing putaway means strategically placing received goods into storage locations within Körber WMS to maximize space efficiency and minimize retrieval times. This goal ensures that your warehouse footprint is used effectively, reducing clutter, improving accessibility, and streamlining future picking operations, leading to significant cost savings and faster processing.

Reducing picking errors involves ensuring that the correct items and quantities are consistently picked for each order within Körber WMS. Achieving this goal directly improves customer satisfaction, reduces return rates, and eliminates costly re-picks or re-shipments, safeguarding your brand's reputation and bottom line.

This goal focuses on eliminating bottlenecks and inefficiencies within the packing stages of your warehouse operations, ensuring orders are prepared for shipment quickly and accurately in Körber WMS. Achieving this accelerates dispatch times, reduces labor costs, and improves overall order fulfillment speed, directly impacting customer delivery expectations and satisfaction.

Reducing the end-to-end order cycle time means shortening the period from when a warehouse order is created until it is dispatched, all managed through Körber WMS. This comprehensive goal encompasses all stages from receipt to shipment, leading to quicker customer deliveries, improved operational agility, and a significant competitive advantage in the market.

Achieving this goal means consistently adhering to the predefined operational procedures and workflows for all activities within your Körber WMS-driven warehouse management. High compliance reduces process variations, minimizes errors, ensures regulatory adherence, and creates a predictable, efficient operation that can be easily scaled and optimized.

This goal aims to ensure that your warehouse equipment, personnel, and storage capacity are used to their fullest potential in Körber WMS. Maximizing utilization reduces idle time, lowers operational costs, and increases the overall throughput of your warehouse, allowing you to handle higher volumes without additional investment.

Improving inventory accuracy means ensuring that the physical count of items perfectly matches the digital records within Körber WMS. Achieving this goal prevents stockouts, reduces excess inventory, minimizes discrepancies, and enables more reliable planning and forecasting, leading to better financial performance and customer service.

This goal focuses on reducing the time it takes to conduct quality inspections on incoming or outgoing goods within your Körber WMS ecosystem. Expediting this critical step minimizes delays in product availability, speeds up putaway or shipment, and ensures that quality checks do not become a bottleneck in the overall material flow.

Reducing expedited shipping means minimizing instances where costly, fast-track shipping methods are required due to internal warehouse delays or inefficiencies. Achieving this goal significantly cuts transportation expenses, improves profitability, and indicates a more proactive and efficient warehouse management process driven by Körber WMS.

This goal aims to continuously refine the allocation and arrangement of products within your warehouse's storage locations, as managed by Körber WMS. By enhancing optimization, you can improve picking path efficiency, reduce travel times for operators, and ensure that fast-moving items are easily accessible, leading to faster fulfillment and reduced labor costs.

The 6-Step Improvement Path for Warehouse Management

1

Download the Template
2

Export Your Data
3

Upload Your Dataset
4

Analyze Your Process
5

Implement Improvements
6

Monitor Your Process
1

Download the Template

What to do

Get the specialized Excel template designed for Warehouse Management data extraction from Körber WMS. This template ensures your data is correctly structured for analysis.

View Data Template Guide Download Template
Why it matters

A standardized template simplifies data preparation, reducing errors and ensuring that all necessary process information is captured accurately from your WMS.

Expected outcome

A ready-to-use data template tailored for Körber WMS warehouse operations.

WHAT YOU WILL GET

Uncover Hidden Efficiencies in Your Körber WMS

ProcessMind reveals the true execution of your warehouse operations, providing detailed visualizations and actionable insights. Understand where delays occur, resources are misallocated, and compliance gaps exist.
  • Visualize your actual Körber WMS flows
  • Pinpoint exact bottlenecks and delays
  • Optimize resource and equipment utilization
  • Ensure seamless material flow and compliance
Discover your actual process flow
Discover your actual process flow
Identify bottlenecks and delays
Identify bottlenecks and delays
Analyze process variants
Analyze process variants
Design your optimized process
Design your optimized process

TYPICAL OUTCOMES

Tangible Outcomes from Optimized Warehouse Management

These outcomes showcase the substantial operational improvements realized by organizations that apply process mining to their Warehouse Management operations, particularly when analyzing "Warehouse Order" cases within Körber WMS data.

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Shorter Order Cycle Time

Reduction in end-to-end processing

Process mining identifies bottlenecks across the entire warehouse order flow, leading to significant reductions in the time from order creation to completion. This enhances customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
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Reduced Picking Errors

Lowered discrepancy rate

By analyzing picking patterns and discrepancies, organizations can pinpoint root causes of errors, leading to a substantial decrease in incorrect picks. This improves inventory accuracy and reduces return costs.
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Faster Goods Receipt

Accelerated inbound processing

Identifying delays in receiving and putaway processes allows for streamlining operations, ensuring goods are available for picking and shipping sooner. This optimizes stock levels and improves supply chain flow.
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Reduced Process Deviations

Fewer non-standard activities

By identifying and eliminating non-compliant process steps and rework loops, organizations significantly reduce deviations from standard warehouse operations. This improves efficiency and ensures regulatory adherence.
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Optimized Resource Util.

Enhanced operator productivity

Process mining provides insights into operator workload and idle times, allowing for better allocation of staff and equipment. This maximizes throughput per operator and reduces operational costs.
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Fewer Expedited Shipments

Reduced high-cost deliveries

By understanding the root causes of expedited shipping, businesses can proactively address bottlenecks and improve planning, leading to a significant reduction in costly last-minute shipments.

Results vary based on initial process maturity, data quality, and specific operational contexts. The figures presented here reflect common improvements observed in similar Warehouse Management implementations using Körber WMS.

FAQs

Frequently asked questions

Process mining analyzes event logs from Körber WMS to visualize the actual flow of warehouse operations. It identifies bottlenecks, deviations from standard processes, and areas of inefficiency, such as slow goods receipt or inefficient putaway strategies. This visibility allows for data-driven decisions to optimize the entire order cycle and improve overall efficiency.

To perform process mining, you primarily need event logs from your Körber WMS. These logs should include a Case Identifier, like Warehouse Order, an Activity Name, describing each step, and a Timestamp for when each activity occurred. Additional attributes, such as resource information or material details, can enrich the analysis.

Process mining can lead to significant improvements, such as accelerating goods receipt cycle time by 20%, optimizing putaway location utilization by 15%, and reducing picking errors by 50%. It also helps streamline packing, reduce overall order cycle times, and ensure higher compliance with standard processes. These improvements are driven by clear, data-backed insights into process inefficiencies.

Initial insights can often be generated within a few weeks after data extraction and ingestion are complete. More in-depth analysis and the implementation of improvements will naturally take longer. The speed of results depends on the complexity of the identified issues and organizational readiness for change.

Yes, process mining is highly effective at identifying deviations from your defined standard operating procedures. It visually compares the actual process flow, derived from event logs, against your ideal model. This allows you to quickly spot non-compliant activities or unauthorized shortcuts, helping you ensure a high level of compliance.

Implementing process mining primarily involves extracting the right data from your existing Körber WMS. The process mining tool then ingests and analyzes this data, requiring minimal changes to your live WMS environment. Most effort focuses on initial data identification and extraction, not system modification.

The primary technical requirement is access to your Körber WMS database or log files to extract event data. This data is then typically loaded into a specialized process mining platform, which can be cloud-based or on-premise. No direct modifications to the WMS system itself are usually required for the analysis phase.

Process mining precisely maps out the time spent on each step, highlighting where delays occur in the goods receipt process. It can pinpoint specific resource constraints, sequencing issues, or data entry errors that contribute to these delays. This allows you to target the root causes with specific corrective actions.

Data security is paramount. When performing process mining, data is typically extracted and then anonymized or pseudonymized before being loaded into the process mining tool. Most reputable process mining platforms adhere to strict data security and privacy standards, ensuring your sensitive WMS information remains protected.

Process mining complements, rather than replaces, traditional BI and reporting tools. While BI shows "what happened", process mining explains "why it happened" by focusing on the actual flow and sequence of events. It provides deeper, actionable insights into process inefficiencies that standard reports might miss.

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