Gartner emphasises WMS agility

Core WMS functionality has remained fundamentally the same (receiving, put-away, inventory management, cycle counting, rule-based locator, picking, replenishment, packing and shipping), but leading WMS vendors continually expand the breadth of their footprints by providing more value-added capabilities around the core WMS — what Gartner calls Extended WMS. 

Recently, vendors have focused on improving their technical architectures to enable users to more easily adapt the WMS to their environments during and after implementation.

Gartner states there is continued momentum for application modernisation across the enterprise application landscape, and WMS applications aren't exempt from this trend. Two primary factors drive the importance of WMS technology modernisation:

■ The market's maturity means many enterprises are using ageing WMSs, with obsolete or soon-to-be-obsolete technical architectures. If the vendor providing the underlying technical building blocks plans to stop supporting those technologies, then this alone is justification to modernise, although the business case for doing so will be difficult. Regrettably, many companies significantly customised their WMS in the past, and this has made upgrades or migrations to new solutions costly and difficult.

■ Companies must invest in applications built on technologies that are better suited to the needs of the business and end users. In this case, the need for agility is leading new buyers to place more emphasis on WMS technology platforms.

WMS scalability and performance are of particular importance in high-volume, high-throughput warehouse operations like online or catalog selling or service parts management. Users in these high-performance environments should first consider the ability of the WMS to handle high transaction volumes by talking to other vendor clients with similar volumes. Second, they should focus on functional capabilities that facilitate processes in high-performance operations, looking at issues like "wave" picking, task interleaving, automation support and user capabilities like voice or pick to light. Users should also require vendors to provide references in similar environments to ensure the capabilities will fit their needs.

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Gartner finds supply chain organisations reordering priorities away from a myopic focus on brute force cost reduction, to now looking for means to not only be more targeted and intelligent with cost reduction, but also to find mechanisms to make cost reductions sustainable. Productivity and efficiency are now more important priorities, as are growing the business and innovation.

One area where Gartner finds growing client interest is in targeted automation (for example, voice, pick to light, put-walls and sortation). Although Gartner evaluates WMS vendor strategies for integrating to automation, it does not evaluate specific automation technologies or material handling system integration vendors.

Users considering automation must formulate an automation strategy before conducting a WMS evaluation. Those considering highly automated facilities should focus first on selecting the material-handling or engineering firm and designing the new facility. Once that decision is made, determine the appropriate strategy for a new WMS.

Best-of-Breed v Megasuite

Once exclusively the domain of best-of-breed (BOB) vendors, WMS functionality has now become a viable component in the supply chain management suites of megasuite (as in, ERP) solutions providers (for example, SAP, Oracle, Infor and Microsoft). Gartner research finds that 67% of surveyed companies say they have committed to a single megasuite vendor, and of those, 53% say they have a strong preference for using their megasuite vendors' SCM components.

While megasuite vendors' initial forays into WMS were little more than multibin inventory tracking systems, the current solutions are increasingly robust WMSs. These offerings now cover, at a minimum, core WMS functionality, and are beginning to cover more of the WMS footprint as the megasuite vendors continue to enhance these solutions. While heterogeneity favours BOB WMS vendors, company's desire to minimise the numbers of supply chain products and vendors they support favours ERP vendors. Furthermore, many organisations will have dual strategies where a BOB solution might be best for their largest, most complex and most automated facilities, and where ERP WMS might support the less-sophisticated warehouse operations. Companies should avoid the temptation to begin with "why not" their megasuite vendors' WMS, even though they might automatically shortlist this offering. The best approach has and will continue to let the business and functional needs drive the selection process and to not overly favour any vendor or WMS without doing the proper due diligence.

Recommendations

■ Move technical architecture higher on the list of evaluation criteria. Make it second only to functionality.

■ Focus as much time and energy on investigating support for enhanced decision making as basic process and activity execution.

■ Be specific and detailed in defining your critical process requirements. Match these must-have requirements to the available systems, and determine whether they can be configured into the base system or will require customisation.

■ Strive for a near-zero-customisation implementation, focusing on configurability, business rule engines, and tailorable and simple user interfaces.

■ Consider the impact and importance of various deployment models, and the vendor and solutions ability to support specific vertical industry requirements as necessary.

You can purchase the full paper – The Dominant Themes of WMS Vendor Evaluation – from Gartner by following this link – http://gtnr.it/1kLwcoR