Borders might close, perhaps some of your suppliers go quiet, maybe a port that’s been moving half your inbound stock for the last twelve months is suddenly operating at a fraction of its normal capacity.
To add to your problems, you might find that it’s now impossible to replenish a product category for which you’ve previously, comfortably, been able to hold two weeks of stock. And none of this is new. It’s all happened before, in various forms. And it’s going to happen again.
It’s like Déjà vu, all over again.
But what IS new is the expectation that your operation should be able to absorb all of it without dropping a single ball.
Remember the early 2020s? The Pandemic rewrote the rules of global logistics pretty much overnight. Warehouses that had been happily ticking along, found themselves caught in between a rapidly evaporating supply and dramatically changing demand patterns, as people moved to buying online rather than on the high street.
The operations that came through all of that (mostly) unscathed weren’t necessarily the biggest or the best-resourced. But they were the ones that could answer a couple of rather critical questions quickly: what do we have on hand, and what can we do with it right now?
A few years previously, tariff changes on a significant volume of traded goods had forced procurement teams to rebuild supplier relationships within months rather than over years. While at the same time, warehouses were scrambling to understand what their existing stock was actually worth, and how long it would last.
Before that, extreme weather events shut down distribution routes that businesses had relied on for years.
And then there’s what’s going on right now.
So, while events do change, the pattern is always the same: something happens, restrictions arise, priorities shift, and your warehouse (which has spent years being optimised around one set of assumptions that no longer apply) has to adapt. ASAP.
When something unexpected hits your supply chain, the instinct is often to focus on the upstream problems: the supplier, the route, the stock. But actually, there are two problems running in parallel here.
The first problem is visibility. When your inbound situation changes suddenly, you need answers from your WMS… and you need them quickly. Which orders are at risk? Which stock is most affected? Where is that stock, right now? What cover do you have on the lines that matter to the business the most? None of these are questions that you can wait 24 hours to get answers for (while someone pulls a report).
The second problem is execution. Orders still need picking. Staff still need directing. And if the mix of what’s being picked has changed (maybe because certain lines are now prioritised, or perhaps because volume has shifted) your picking routes and task sequencing need to reflect what’s going on today, right now, and not what was happening last week.
The data’s there, but often it’s locked behind reports that need someone technical to generate. Picking logic is being used, but it was configured for normal conditions, and if conditions are no longer normal, that logic might not still apply.
AskUSP is a natural language interface, connected to Dispatcher WMS via Socius24’s User Services Portal (USP). The idea is simple: instead of requesting a report, a warehouse manager can type a question in plain English and get an answer.
“Show me all open orders where stock is below required quantity.” “Which locations contain goods from (the affected) supplier?”
Even normally, this is a huge productivity gain. But when the Supply Chain is experiencing disruption, this ability shapeshifts into something even more important; the difference between knowing where you are right now and knowing where you were when the report you asked IT for was run.
The data has always been in Dispatcher WMS. Now, AskUSP gives access to the people who need it, when they need it.
Pick paths that made sense yesterday might not make sense today. If volume has changed, or if priority lines are different, then optimal routes through the warehouse have changed as well.
Optioryx , which integrates directly with Blue Yonder‘s Dispatcher WMS, can handle that execution layer for you. Using AI to optimise your pick walks, clustering and task sequencing at the move task level, it continuously works out the most efficient ways to get your team through the work, based on what the work is right NOW, rather than what it was at go-live.
In practice, this means that when your inbound picture changes and your picking priorities shift, the floor adjusts to them. Optimisation reflects current conditions because it’s operating on live, real-time data.
You’ll notice that both of these capabilities are built on top of Dispatcher WMS. That’s not by chance. Businesses that can rely on solid foundations always adapt faster than those that don’t.
Nobody can predict what form the next supply chain disruption will take, or when it will get here. But organisations that have been through a few of them tend to stop making predictions, and instead, start focusing on something more useful: how quickly can they understand their position, and how quickly can they adapt?
If you already know that your answer to both of those questions is ‘not as fast as we’d like,’ it’s worth having a chat.
Book your free, no obligation demo with the Socius24 team and we’ll walk you through it.
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