Warehouse Management System (WMS)

Optimize the movement of inventory—including the people and material handling equipment required to move it.

 

When selecting a new WMS, “the devil is in the details”

 

Is your warehouse keeping up with the speed of your business and industry? Pressure from competition and customers requires you to optimize your supply chain—it’s simply not enough to do things the old way and outrun the competition. Often, companies are just a step away from a breakthrough. Maybe it’s an upgrade to infrastructure, or more flexibility and additional scalability to lean into new opportunities. Some could benefit immensely from additional IT resources.

“Software – it’s invisible, essential and yet all too often completely underestimated. Though we are mostly unaware of it, software accompanies us everywhere in our daily lives and has us wrapped up in its digital network. Needless to say, software plays an important role in a logistics system as well, where it breathes intelligent life into the mechanical components”

A faster, more cost-effective, and agile warehouse is often the difference between getting ahead and falling behind. A cloud-based warehouse management system (WMS) offers the tools to connect and optimize every corner of your supply chain. Meet WMS in the cloud, the end-to-end warehouse management suite including inventory management, labor performance optimization, warehouse processes, and material flow control. Our WMS in the cloud powers dozens of retailers, wholesalers, manufacturers and third-party logistics providers across the US and Canada. It is highly scalable, reliable, secure, and battle-tested for any size of operation or level of complexity. Elevate your warehouse from a cost center to a strategic differentiator with the cloud-powered WMS.



WMS Critical Capabilities

While functionality remains mission critical, it’s important to consider areas such as adaptability, usability, and implementation tools as well


Benefits of Cloud Based WMS

  • SCALE WITH CONFIDENCE NOW - Empower growth with unlimited scalability to meet demand

  • EXTENSION OF YOUR IT TEAM - Allocate internal resources to make a more significant business impact ‘we will take care of the rest’

  • PAY AS YOU GROW, GET FASTER ROI - The future of your supply chain with a subscription that enables increased speed-to-value

  • ENSURE BUSINESS CONTINUITY, UPTIME AND COMPLIANCE - Reliability offering peace-of-mind, so you can focus on growing your business

  • ACCESS YOUR WMS ANYWHERE, ANYTIME - With cloud’s accessibility, your WMS is always at your fingertips

  • CONTROL YOUR OWN DESTINY - Meet today’s challenges and beat tomorrow’s obstacles with the most flexible, adaptable WMS

Some of the advantages of using a Warehouse Management System are:

  • Accelerating and Fine-Tuning Order Fulfillment

  • The Just-In Time Inventory

  • Increasing Warehouse Productivity

  • Enhanced Security

  • Reduce Operating Expenses

  • Inbound and Outbound Optimisation

ROI Benefits:

  • Increased inventory accuracy by 10% – 20%

  • Reduced inventory and labour costs by 20% – 30%

  • Reduced forklift travel time by up to 50%

Today’s business environment requires you to implement innovative solutions to effectively manage increasingly complex supply chains while simultaneously reducing operational expenses. eCommerce growth and the shift towards the omnichannel retail model are challenging logistics professionals in new ways. Customer compliance and regulatory compliance also present hurdles for you and your team.

It’s your job to continually improve processes while constantly managing change and meeting strategic business objectives. To accomplish this, you must arm yourself with a warehouse management system and a partner who embraces agile, innovative solutions. It’s in our DNA to build supply chain technologies that allow you to respond to market needs – all delivered through our future-proof, mobile-enabled execution platform. And, because we provide you with the ability to respond to changes yourself, instead of a long term dependence on the technology provider, our solutions have a compelling total cost of ownership (TCO) when compared to traditional warehouse management system.

WMS offerings continue to differ across use cases and in capabilities such as usability, adaptability, analytics, supporting technologies, materials handling integration, and core and extended functionality. Supply chain technology leaders can use our research to compare specific WMS solutions.

Key Findings

Parity exists across the most basic, core capabilities of warehouse management system (WMS) offerings because WMS is a mature technology market. However, although there is some differentiation in the depth of core WMS capabilities, it is less impactful.

Differences between WMS products are far greater for capabilities such as simplicity, usability, adaptability, software-enabled implementation support capabilities and the most advanced functionalities needed for complex facilities.

The polar opposite extremes of WMS support for the most simple Level 1 and the most complex and automated Level 5 use cases contrast vendors and solutions dramatically.

Although functionality remains of paramount importance, other product factors such as adaptability, usability and tools to facilitate implementation are now having increased influence on WMS selection.

Strategic Planning Assumption

By the end of 2021, half of new WMS deployments will be cloud.

Through 2022, companies will struggle to find packaged solutions that pragmatically support Level 1 warehouse operations.

Through 2022, addressing operational labor constraints will be a prime motivating factor for purchasing a new WMS.

What You Need to Know

Supply chain and IT leaders should use our research as part of an evaluation of WMS products. The evaluation is based on what we consider to be the nine key differentiating product capabilities evaluated across five major use cases of warehouse and distribution center operational needs based on warehouse complexity. We are able to assess the vendors that better offer the products and services for your business. Our research evaluated will allow you to make choices that balance the importance of both product capabilities and business and commercial criteria.

Although there are similarities across assorted strata of warehouse operations, there are also notable differences when considering various levels of complexity and sophistication. These differences demand specific scrutiny when evaluating new WMS investments. For this research, we identify nine critical capabilities. We then use a warehouse stratification model to highlight five different use cases from very simple Level 1 warehouse operations to highly automated Level 5 facilities (see “Apply an Architectural Framework to Stratifying Warehouse Management Systems”). Offerings are evaluated by weighting critical capabilities by use case, and depending on the specific offering, positions will change due to fit considerations.

How can our software engineers help with your WMS requirements:

  • Develop the proper shortlist of vendors by using this research as a guide to help target the vendors best suited to your actual WMS use cases.

  • Focus WMS evaluation on the appropriate use cases by first stratifying each of your warehouse locations to understand the operational characteristics of each of your warehouse environments.

  • Align your needs properly with the appropriate WMS use cases by reviewing and understanding the weightings of the most compelling criteria for each use case.

  • Embrace the importance of soft benefits by reconciling the competing interests of functionality versus less tangible characteristics like usability, adaptability, implementation support and simplicity.