Warehouse Picking and Dispatch Integration

Many Australian ERPs and inventory platforms include picking, scanning and dispatch features that are perfectly adequate for a single site with a manageable range. Buying a separate warehouse system on top adds licence cost, another integration and another vendor relationship, so it should be a decision with a reason behind it: multiple sites, bin level tracking, high line volume per order, wave planning, or a picking method your current tool genuinely cannot express. We look at what you already own first, and we are happy to tell you the answer is a connection rather than a new platform.

On hand is what you physically own, including the units already promised to orders that have not shipped and the ones sitting in quarantine or damaged. Available to promise is what is genuinely free to sell right now: on hand, less reserved, less unsellable, less any safety buffer you hold deliberately on lines that move fast. Sales channels should be fed available to promise. Publishing on hand to a busy store is the most common technical cause of overselling, and it is entirely avoidable.

We will not quote you a number we cannot stand behind, because the honest answer depends on your starting point, how similar your products look and how experienced your pickers are. What we can say is that the improvement shows up first in credits and replacement freight rather than in picking time, and that the businesses which measure it usually find the error reduction pays for the hardware well before the integration finishes paying for itself. Measure your own error rate before you start so the comparison means something.

Often, yes. Modern phone cameras read barcodes well enough for pack benches, receipting and lower volume picking, and the saving on hardware is real. The case for purpose built handhelds is battery life through a full shift, a physical scan trigger for one handed use, durability when a unit hits a concrete floor from shoulder height, and comfort for a picker scanning several hundred lines a day. We usually suggest starting with phones on the bench and terminals in the aisles, and we will tell you if your volume does not justify the terminals yet.

It has to, because most warehouses have at least one dead spot. The mobile flow should queue scans locally and sync when the connection returns, so a dropout mid pick slows a picker down rather than losing their work. That said, patching over poor coverage with software is a compromise. If the far aisles and the dock have no signal, the right fix is a coverage survey and a couple of extra access points, which costs less than the productivity you lose working around it.

Kits and bundles need a decision about whether stock is held at component level or at kit level, and the integration has to publish availability based on whichever you choose, calculated from the scarcest component if it is the former. Items sold by variable weight, common in food and some industrial supply, need the captured weight to flow through to both the invoice and the stock movement, which means the scale at the bench has to be part of the integration rather than a separate note on a clipboard. Both are solvable, and both are much cheaper to design in at the start than to retrofit.

Budget for ongoing cost as well as build. A managed arrangement covers hosting, monitoring, same day response when a carrier or platform changes an interface, and the small adjustments that come out of real use in the first few months. As a rough guide, ongoing support and hosting across integration work of this kind tends to run between twenty and forty percent of the initial build over time. We quote a fixed build price plus a flat monthly managed fee, and we avoid per order pricing because it penalises you for having a good month.