Multi-Tenancy in WMS
A few days back I got the opportunity to talk about the challenges for 3PLs in today's economy on a webcast (available here) with Greg Aimi from AMR.
Greg talked about the latest trends in the space, while I talked about the best in class abilities that a 3PL's WMS should have. During the QnA session at the end, there was a question about the key IT differentiating capabilities for such a WMS. I mentioned that multi tenancy is a hygiene factor and is a given.
A question that cropped up later was what are the best in class multi-tenancy features?
A laundry list of my must-haves follow:
At its very basic level, the WMS should be able to host multiple customers on the same instance.This includes the ability to host multiple catalogs, customer databases, warehouse layouts
The WMS should be able to network the inventory organization. The customer should have the ability to view inventory across multiple levels.
The WMS should be flexible to segregate customer inventory on the same physical layout
The WMS should host different solutions for its customers and for its customers' customers.
Varying access and security rules should be possible by customer.
The WMS should be able to host different versions of the same solution by customer. For instance, the customer wants to run DCs under different business rules as compared to its store rooms. So while at an enterprise level the customer should be able to see global inventory, processes within each component of the supply chain could be different.
(The common thread is a principle that I call Singular Diversity - within IT, I define it as the ability to manage diverse information as a collective and conversely the ability to manage an assimilation by managing its disparates.)
So, what else would you add to the laundry list above?
Comments
Nice article on Multi Tenancy WMS. To add to your laundry list -
1. The WMS should be able to define a Customer (who just uses the warehouse to store his goods) or a client (who has his own set of suppliers and customers, who acts as a trader). So it should be able to maintain inventory by Customer and by Client/Supplier combination.
2. The WMS should be able to reserve locations for Clients/Customers or allow random putaway and should be able to track their items.
2. Able to define a 3PL contract (I have written a blog on this earlier in this forum)
3. On the billing side, able to support storage based and activity based billing.
4. Able to define cost drivers for calculating the cost for a specific product taking part in a certain activity. For example, if the transaction is receiving, and the activity is Order receipt, the cost driver could be 'per order weight' or 'number of cartons received by size'.
5. Define various UOMs since a 3PL needs to calculate cost for activity and non-activity related costs based on them.
Posted by: Lokmanya | March 24, 2009 07:41 AM