WMS-The new pain points
Some time back I had written about the key requirements for Multi Tenancy in WMS (here). I spoke about a similar topic at Sterling Commerce Connect (read Gopi's despatches from the event here and here)
The topic was Global WMS deployment and our experiences while doing such implementations.
In the course of the session we talked about the challenges faced in WMS and we noticed that quite a few were more 'traditional' - pertaining to the standard challenges faced by any software that manages operations. Things like speeding up people's tasks, seamless interleaving of physical movement of inventory and systemic processing; however another interesting facet was the focus on being able to deploy quicker and faster with MORE site specific customizations. More?
One conversation with a representative of a large logistics major was contrary to traditional logic about unified processes and efficiency. The view was unified processes were forced upon different sites due to constraints within WMS software and inability of implementation teams to implement faster, cheaper, better, and that the best scenario was when the solution allowed multiple site specific processes to co-exist on the same solution.
In the course of one more conversation, another customer wanted more control centrally while being able to allow site teams to manage site specific logic.
Overall the key needs were:
- Ability to run multiple solutions and to seamlessly reconcile functionality across them.
- Ability to add and remove sites without implementation projects.
- Ability to customize labels and prints without the need for IT inputs.
- Ability to map processes without the need for IT inputs.
- Ability to make UI behavior dynamic by site
- Ability to run all this from a central location without the need for multiple deployments
