A constant battle in any working environment is finding ways to best utilize your time so that you are doing what you do best and not spending your time on other tasks. As an example I have seen warehouses in which the warehouse manager spent nearly all of their time taking orders from paper and entering them into the computer so that they could print the pick ticket, and then after the order is picked he or she has to update the system and print the invoice. They hardly leave their office, leaving them essentially no time to see what is going on around the warehouse or look for ways to improve operations.
I think Marcus Buckingham has it right when he says "Do what you do best, Outsource the rest". We only have so much bandwidth when it comes to day to day activities and sometimes it is important to step back and re-evaluate priorities to find out what tasks can be "redistributed". In the case of the warehouses I mentioned above, a warehouse management system(WMS) would not only be able to free up those warehouse managers' time but allow them to take a look at their warehouses and see where they have opportunities to improve productivity, efficiency, etc. In the case of IT personnel who spend all of their time trying to keep their server up and running, a WMS in the cloud might be just what they need to free up the time to improve overall operations. And as for the warehouse logistics workers who spend much of their time fixing errors, running to find missed product, or trying to find where that last shipment was put away, there is substantial time saving. Even the time and hassle of shutting down your warehouse every month to do a physical inventory count can be overcome with cycle counts, also decreasing the number of errors which the people in the office have to sort through. So the next time you find yourself thinking, "There has to be a better way to do this," there probably is and it might be worth your time to look into a system that would help you do what you do best.
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