Executive Summary
The warehouse management survey was conducted by Acsis in April 2010. The purpose of the survey is to enable industry executives to benchmarks their own warehouse management practices against those of their peers. Over one hundred respondents completed the online survey.
Among the key findings of the survey:

• The need to decrease operating expenses is by far the most pressing issue driving companies to seek improvements in warehouse performance, indicated by 74% of survey respondents.

•The strategic action most commonly taken in response to warehouse performance pressures is improving visibility to incoming inventory status, selected by 56% of the respondents.

•When asked about specific warehouse management initiatives, an overwhelming portion of the respondents (88%) are implementing more efficient order fulfillment processes in response to the business pressures.

•Accurate shipments (59%) and on‐time shipments (57%) are the most commonly used indicators for warehouse efficiency among survey respondents.

•Many survey respondents have rather immediate visibility to the location of goods following put‐away or other product moves. 42% have real‐time visibility, and another 6% has visibility within less than one hour.

•The majority of those surveyed (65%) use barcode scanning to confirm transactions in the warehouse. At the same time, almost a fourth of the respondents indicated they use no confirmation mechanism (23%) at all.

•Over a third (36%) of respondents use the Warehouse Management module of their ERP system, and 4% use this module as part of their supply management suite.

•Over 80% of the respondents use automated data collection to streamline operations. However, 42% cited that it is either outdated or provides only partial automation.