Have you outgrown your Warehouse Management System (WMS)? This continues an overview of the telltale signs that it might be time to start your search for a replacement.

Warehouse Management System

Is your Warehouse Management System holding you back?  (Part 3)

Your WMS doesn’t play well with others. If your WMS system coexists with an ERP backbone, it should be fully integrated, sharing data in standardized formats with all the other applications, from financials and accounting to supply chain management, customer relationship management, even HR applications. If that’s increasingly a problem as your ERP system evolves and new, smarter modules replace the old ones, you probably inadvertently made your WMS obsolete. Rather than struggle with integration issues, it might be time to replace it with a more easily interoperable solution that gets you all the other benefits we have been enumerating.

If your WMS is not part of an ERP system, it should be the backbone that integrates all the other systems you are running. Same story: if that’s getting more and more difficult to achieve, it’s probably time to pull the plug.

Your WMS isn’t user friendly. In the Internet age, users expect screens to be easy to navigate, intuitive and have a graphical user interface. Pull-down menus, customizable data fields and programmable buttons improve individual productivity, cut down on errors and reduce operator fatigue. It’s easier and faster the complete tasks and access data. User-friendly systems cut down on training time and costs, too, and help support high adoption and usage rates. If your system still looks and feels like something out of the MS-DOS era, it’s time for an update.

Something to insist on: Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). When you do start looking for a replacement WMS you’ll want to be sure it’s built on SOA. SOA vastly simplifies the task of plugging and unplugging other modules without time consuming and costly armies of consultants. In a sense, it future proofs your WMS, ensuring many of the problems we’ve discussed re: outmoded, inflexible and under-performing systems are postponed many years with your new system. SOA also makes it easier to integrate best of breed solutions from other software vendors without having to depend on you main WMS vendor to innovate the next big idea.

Your WMS plays an important role in supporting your business growth, staying a step ahead of ever-changing and escalating customer requirements, and complying with onerous industry regulations. As great as the potential for benefit from a WMS, at some point it is a possibility that a weak WMS is hampering the growth and success of your business. An ineffective WMS may be constraining your potential for achieving business process improvements, global growth, adding new customers and keeping existing customers happy.

Selecting a new WMS vendor starts with forecasting operational growth and change. Reach here; it will add years to the new system’s life. Create a project team to review all your current processes and tighten them up. Automating a weak manual system gets you an expensive, weak automated system. Also, look at the whole process from your ERP system’s vantage point; the tighter the integration and interoperability of the two, the more efficient and effective your organization will become.

Written by :

pamelarichards