Exploring the Benefits of Warehouse Management Systems in the Automotive Industry

This paper investigates the benefits that the Warehouse Management Systems (WMS) have brought to the main warehouse centres, which serve the biggest automotive companies in Saudi Arabia. The research has been concentrated to the two main logistics functional areas in a warehouse; warehousing (materials management) and inventory management. After synthesizing the existed literature the study identifies the advantages of the usage of WMS in the logistics and business processes in the examined sector and assesses the benefits in the processes comparing with the usage of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. Furthermore, the findings of research that conducted at the main warehouse automotive centers in Saudi Arabia are presented and discussed. The findings reveal that the usage of WMS has brought substantial benefits to the companies and also that managers and warehouse staff evaluated differently the benefits of WMS.