10 Best B2B Warehouse Management Software Solutions for Small Businesses in 2024
Are warehouse expenses spiraling out of control?
If you’re to monetize your warehouse and increase profits, you need to seal waste.
However, when you’re held back by operational complexities and legacy systems, resource wastages go undetected, slowly draining your bottom line.
A study by Manhattan revealed that, for 55% of warehouses, the biggest challenges include operational complexities and out-of-date technologies. These made it nearly impossible to identify revenue-sapping inefficiencies.
However, you can easily turn this situation around by using the best B2B warehouse management software to gain important analytics & insights. With real-time data about warehouse processes, you can raise efficiency and spot resource-draining bottlenecks.
By also helping to eliminate various iterative & manual processes, these tools will also improve warehouse worker productivity so you can increase throughput and revenue.
In this article, we’ll discuss the best B2B warehouse management software solutions for 2024 to help you lower operational expenses and increase profit margins.
Quick summary:
1. transloads.co – Best for multi-commodity warehousing & transloading.
2. IBM Sterling – Best for granular inventory tracking capabilities.
3. BlueYonder – Best for efficient warehouse labor management.
4. Vin WMS – Best for automating third-party logistics billing.
5. NetSuite WMS – Best for mobile-driven warehouse management.
Let’s get started.
1. transloads.co
Keen to raise B2B transloading efficiency?
transloads.co is a top B2B warehouse transload management software that can help implement full shipment lifecycle tracking. You can automatically track goods you purchase from manufacturers as well as outbound shipment to increase efficiency.
With transloads.co, you also get electronic tally sheets to keep track of different types of cargo as they arrive or leave your warehouse for accurate stocktaking.
Our software also ranks among the top innovations in warehouse management for its cloud-based warehouse management system. This ensures quick deployment, massive cost-efficiency and excellent scalability that fuels rapid growth.
Best features:
- transloads.co offers electronic document templates for bills of lading, purchase orders and other complex documentation that your B2B warehouse handles. You can create and store these files in the cloud for remote access.
- You can configure its user interface to match your unique cargo requirements. This enables you to perform multi-commodity handling more efficiently for palletized goods, lumber, bulk shipments and other different types of cargo.
- transloads.co also offers robust inventory management features that let you track inventory by weights or volume. You also get inventory forms to help keep track of on hand, available and committed stock so you can optimize stock levels.
Pricing:
- 30-day free trial.
- Starting plan: $29.95 per load.
Verdict
transloads.co is one of the best B2B warehouse management software on account of its versatility and its ability to support multi-commodity warehousing & transloading needs. What’s more, our software also offers excellent inventory management features that help you to raise inventory accuracy, reduce expenses and improve business efficiency.
2. IBM Sterling
IBM Sterling improves B2B order management.
It provides essential warehouse management software features via a web-based solution that lets you track orders from multiple businesses simultaneously in real time. This enables more efficient and accurate fulfillment processes.
Additionally, IBM Sterling’s quality profiling and inspection features enable your B2B warehouse to reduce shipping mistakes and improve customer satisfaction.
Want to keep a closer eye on your inventory?
It also doubles up as one of the top warehouse inventory management tools because it offers granular inventory tracking by location and date of acquisition. This helps you implement a first-in-first-out system to reduce spoilage & optimize warehouse space.
Best features:
- IBM Sterling offers task interleaving features that allow you to strategically assign putaway and retrieval tasks to your warehouse workers to increase productivity. It can also generate and even automatically assign tasks to boost efficiency further.
- You also get important cross-docking controls that enable you to efficiently route inbound shipments directly onto shipping lanes. With this feature, you can increase warehouse space efficiency and lower labor needs and risk of damage.
- With its order consolidation module, you can also merge orders from multiple businesses and send them out as a single shipment. By doing so, you can lower shipping costs, decrease your logistics burden and enhance eco-friendliness.
Pricing:
- 30-day free trial.
- Contact IBM for pricing.
Verdict
IBM Sterling’s granular inventory tracking lets you track inventory by weights, volumes and even location, among other intricate details, to facilitate smooth picking operations. However, I’ve noticed that the maintenance and support costs it charges are quite high compared to other solutions on this compilation, making it an expensive solution.
3. BlueYonder
Want to get the most out of warehouse resources?
BlueYonder’s resource orchestration makes it one of the best B2B warehouse management software to help you schedule warehouse taks, track labor and improve performances for your transloading or intermodal shipping warehouse business.
With its integrated path optimization features, you can reduce travel time to increase direct labor time and improve throughput for your B2B warehouse.
Just like transloads.co, which is also a top yard management software, BlueYonder lets you track and manage yard operations. It gives you the information you need to improve gate processes and dock scheduling to greatly enhance your receiving operations.
Best features:
- BlueYonder offers unified warehouse yard management capabilities that help you reduce yard congestion at your facility. In turn, this can help your B2B warehouse increase the efficiency of warehousing operations and reduce shipment delays.
- It also supports work order processing to support various value-added tasks that you may perform, including freight consolidation and disassembly. This feature can help boost warehouse staff productivity to clear your backlogs quickly.
- BlueYonder’s outbound operations feature supports multiple pick methods, including cluster, batch and wave picking, among others. This allows you to optimize picking operations depending on each business’s unique needs.
Pricing:
- No free trial.
- Contact BlueYonder for pricing.
Verdict
If you want to improve labor management at your warehouse to increase efficiency & free up more direct labor time, BlueYonder is a great tool to help ramp up productivity. That being said, I’ve noticed that integrating it with existing systems such as a transport or yard management tool involves hectic data migration that complicates the process.
4. Vin WMS
Vin WMS greatly enhances B2B shipment fulfillment.
By integrating with over 50 last and first mile transporters, including trucking and rail companies, it reinforces your rail road logistic strategies to help you meet delivery timeliness and minimize supply chain disruptions for your business and its clients.
Furthermore, Vin WMS supports soft blocking inventory allocation, which enables more adaptable stock keeping to match market demand fluctuations.
You also get 3PL billing automation that enables you to track and manage payments related to important partners like transload service companies, freight forwarders and others. This reduces discrepancies that often result from manually billing processes.
Best features:
- Vin WMS has inventory pooling features that let you distribute your inventory management burden among different subsidiaries and other business partners. This ensures optimized operations and resource sharing to improve efficiency.
- You also get an out-of-the box integration module that connects Vin WMS with your ERP system. With this integration, you can create a single source of truth for your B2B warehouse and eliminate data double entry to raise efficiency.
- It also offers advanced reports and analytics that helps you create standardized tax, order, turns and inventory processes. This feature is essential to improving operational intelligence and also ensuring more accurate tax calculations.
Pricing:
- No free trial.
- Contact Vinculum Group for pricing.
Verdict
3PL billing can be a complex process for your B2B warehouse, which is where Vin WMS excels with automation that simplifies your billing processes to raise accuracy and efficiency. Nevertheless, I’ve noticed that it offers very limited support for mobile devices, and this can reduce worker productivity and hamper warehouse collaboration.
5. NetSuite WMS
Is inbound processing a big challenge for your warehouse?
You get important warehouse management features such as inbound processing, for example, which lets you pull up purchase histories and access inbound cargo details centrally. This helps improve inbound shipping tracking for more efficient warehousing.
NetSuite WMS offers sync-free integrations with underlying systems to ensure real-time availability of data for end-to-end process improvement.
Just like transloads.co, its mobile accessibility features make it one of the best B2B warehouse management software to help you perform warehouse operations on mobile to increase your transloading shipping business warehouse’s efficiency and productivity.
Best features:
- You get smart inventory cycle counting that helps ensure accurate and up-to-date warehouse inventory information. It even notifies you in case a transaction occurs involving the inventory you’re counting so you can react accordingly.
- It offers warehouse zone distribution features, which lets you assign storage based on various criteria. So it can help you optimize warehouse operations based on goals like cost-reduction, faster retrieval and efficient space utilization.
- NetSuite WMS also has robust functions that support wave release and cluster picking to enhance the efficiency of order fulfillment operations. This also ensures higher ROI for your B2B warehouse by improving picker throughput.
Pricing:
- No free trial.
- Contact NetSuite for pricing.
Verdict
NetSuite’s mobile driven warehouse management system allows your warehouse staff to perform warehouse operations like putaway and receival, among others, more efficiently on the go. However, I’ve realized setting it up for use is complex & it involves a very time-intensive onboarding process, which can make initial adoption a challenge.
6. Easy WMS
Easy WMS makes your B2B warehouse more profitable.
It can help monetize your warehouse better because of its WMS integration with pallet shuttle technology that enables you to speed up pallet entry and exit cycles. With this increased efficiency, you can increase throughput to enhance warehouse revenue.
Additionally, it provides a 3PL client portal that gives customers secure access to stock they own in your warehouse, which strengthens client relationships.
Looking for an on-premise or cloud-based WMS?
It offers on-premise transload management software deployment as well as a cloud-based option, ensuring excellent deployment flexibility. This helps you meet your B2B warehouse’s unique goals and enjoy the best of both worlds.
Best features:
- Easy WMS enables barcode labeling of inventory to enable the tracing of raw materials and other inventory items at large. With this critical feature, you can reduce clerical errors, save time and boost efficiency for your B2B warehouse.
- It provides real-time inventory tracking and synching with your online catalog, with changes about stock items and quantities adjusted automatically. Besides improving efficiency, this also improves decision making for your customers.
- Easy WMS’s 3PL client portal provides customized views, depending on each of your customer’s unique needs and shipment orders. This improves customer personalization to raise customer satisfaction and loyalty for your business.
Pricing:
- No free trial.
- Contact Mecalux Group for pricing.
Verdict
Easy WMS’s customizeable client portals are among its standout features, helping to improve communication and transparency in your warehousing processes. That being said, I’ve established that it has limited reporting and analytics, which can result in delays or even completely missed opportunities for enacting process improvement.
7. Ascent
Keen to turbocharge warehouse productivity?
Ascent is one of the most exciting warehouse management innovations because of its warehouse execution module. This links your WMS to various automation technologies, making it a great B2B warehouse management software to increase productivity.
With its warehouse analytics and reporting capabilities, you also get real-time insights for improving inventory management and other warehouse processes.
Just like transloads.co, it offers key transload warehouse software benefits such as improved inventory accuracy. This is as a result of its barcode scanning technology that also increases the speed & efficiency of inventory processing for your B2B warehouse.
Best features:
- Ascent can scan pallets, bins and bulk goods in your inventory to recreate inventory items and locations on a virtual 3-D map. This gives you a better understanding of where you’ve stored various goods to facilitate timely retrieval.
- It delivers a cloud-based warehouse management system that connects different warehousing operations and tools for holistic improvement. What’s more, this decreases your IT infrastructure needs to enable limitless warehouse scalability.
- Ascent also delivers advanced B2B order management features, including order tracking that enables you and clients to monitor the statuses of orders. This helps to increase warehouse efficiency while improving customer engagement as well.
Pricing:
- No free trial.
- Contact Ascent for pricing.
Verdict
If you’re looking for a top WMS that can help unite various warehouse automation technologies, I recommend Ascent which makes it easy to achieve holistic automation. However, this comes at an extra cost to your warehouse since the warehouse execution module is priced separately from its primary warehouse management offering.
8. ProVision WMS
ProVision WMS is an excellent multi-warehouse solution.
It offers a unified dashboard to centralize operations, making it an excellent platform if you have very complex transload and intermodal shipping logistics and want to perform interwarehouse stock transfers more efficiently across multiple storage facilities.
On top of that, you can leverage ProVision WMS’s RFID technology to implement automated pallet-level tracking for increased efficiency and shipping accuracy.
Keen to improve bulk fulfillment speed and accuracy?
You also set advanced picking and put away logic for your B2B warehouse, making it one of the best warehouse inventory management software to streamline picking and put away processes for increased worker productivity.
Best features:
- ProVision WMS offers inventory tracking and forecasting controls that help your B2B warehouse to predict demand and supply more accurately. With this information, you can optimize inventory to reduce stockouts and overstocking.
- You can set custom rules for controlling user access and system permissions for your WMS. So it reinforces cybersecurity to reduce the risk of breaches that can compromise customer privacy, employee information and operational data.
- By integrating with email to send event trigger-alerts, ProVision WMS gives you timely alerts about important warehouse events like sudden inventory drops or stock arrivals to help you prepare and plan warehouse operations accordingly.
Pricing:
- No free trial.
- Starting plan: $1,130 per month.
Verdict
If you run complex logistics operations across several different warehouse sites, I recommend ProVision WMS to increase multi-warehousing management efficiency. However, it offers an on-premise warehouse management system, which means that, in addition to subscription costs, you may also need to fund in-house IT infrastructure.
9. Peoplevox
Need to track unique and specific warehouse data?
When you choose a transload management system like Peoplevex, you get configurable warehouse dashboards. These enable you to track custom metrics and generate reports and analytics around high-priority aspects for your B2B warehouse.
With over 40 prebuilt ad hoc warehouse report templates, it can also help you create visually-interactive reports with actionable insights very quickly.
Notably, Peoplevox offers a vast ecosystem of integration connectors which let you connect it with the best transload management software, shipping platforms and ERPs to centralize important warehouse data for quick, data-driven decision making.
Best features:
- Peoplevox lets you build custom warehouse workflows that map out efficient picking routes to enable rapid bulk picking operations. Besides improving picking accuracy to reduce mis-ships, this also greatly amplifies warehouse productivity.
- It also lets you add modules, users and resources to match the growing needs of your warehouse as you scale and expand your operations. This makes it an excellent solution for sustainable long-term process improvement and growth.
- You get a native Android warehouse management app with Peoplevox, which enables you to perform basic functions like view or fulfill picking orders. In a large warehouse layout, this app is especially useful for improving on-site stock taking.
Pricing:
- No free trial.
- Starting plan: $195/user per month.
Verdict
Peoplevex’s configurable dashboards easily make it one of the best B2B warehouse management software to help you focus on KPIs & improve high-priority processes. Nevertheless, I’ve noted that it charges upfront software implementation fees, which can skyrocket to as much as $32,000 depending on the complexity of your operations.
10. SphereWMS
Bogged down by many manual, iterative tasks?
Sphere WMS gives you vital features of warehouse management software such as automated workflows. You can create these to handle recurring tasks to reduce the potential for error, boost productivity, and reduce the risk of shipment damage.
In addition, it leverages advanced data encryption, two-factor authentication and frequent third-party audits to secure your warehouse against digital threats.
By scrutinizing historical data, SphereWMS can suggest optimal stock placement to decrease carrying costs. This can also help you monetize your warehouse by identifying periods when you’re likely to have surplus space to rent and generate extra revenue.
Best features:
- You get a robust multi-client warehousing solution, complete with comprehensive inventory segmentation based on different clients. So Sphere WMS is a great tool for managing shared warehouse spaces more efficiently and accurately.
- SphereWMS offers a mobile-driven barcode system that supports a large range of barcode scanners & standards. This allows you to perform complex warehouse operations like automated validation & bulk scanning more efficiently.
- It also delivers real-time reporting and analytics around important KPIs for your business like order fulfillment rates and inventory trends, for example. So it gives you timely information for making strategic decisions about process optimization.
Pricing:
- No free trial.
- Contact SphereWMS for pricing.
Verdict
If you need a very secure warehouse management software that can withstand the advanced digital threats of the day, then I recommend considering SphereWMS. That said, customizing it to fit your warehouse’s unique needs can be very complex, tedious and technical, and this only gets worse as your business continues to scale and grow.
Conclusion
Demand for logistics is rising fast.
That’s great news for your logistiscs business. Unfortunately this has worsened the warehouse worker shortage.
When your B2B warehouse is understaffed, productivity declines and you’ll experience fulfillment delays, increased accidents, and lower revenue.
In fact, it’s the case today that 40% of warehouses are grappling with serious staffing shortages, according to a study by Instawork. This situation is expected to worsen in the coming months.
In the midst of biting labor shortages, the best B2B warehouse management software can ease the pressure with automation. Overall, I recommend transloads.co for automated and efficient full-shipment, lifecycle tracking.
Click here to start your free transloads.co trial to also automate inventory tracking and other key warehouse operations to increase efficiency.
With our software, you’ll also get important workforce management features that help you get the most out of a stretched workflow to increase productivity and revenue.
