WMS in a new light
New warehousing strategies and the emergence of e-commerce are changing how warehouse management systems manage inventory.
By Staff -- Modern Materials Handling, 3/1/2000
Warehouse management systems have been changing the way you run your warehouses and distribution centers for some time now. They have had a strong role in putting an end to warehouses and distribution centers that are merely a place to statically hold inventory until needed by customers.Today, warehouse activities are dynamic. To keep up with the flow of goods and information from the manufacturing plant to the end user, warehouses and DCs have adopted a host of new strategies to increase their speed of doing business. The advent of e-commerce has revved the speed up another notch, transforming the warehouse from a stand-alone facility into an integral part of a total supply chain.
It's a world where the rules of business are being rewritten every day. However, one constant is the need to meet and exceed the customer's expectations.
"The ability to differentiate yourself in customer service will determine who will win and who will lose in any marketplace," says Larry Cinpinski, president and COO of HK Systems. "How quickly I can respond is driven by speed and customer service."
The new rules governing the marketplace are also impacting warehouse management systems and the WMS market. That's because in a world where the customer is king, order execution is paramount. Warehouses and distribution centers are "the last opportunity to get a customer's order right and meet expectations," says Chris Newton, a researcher at AMR Research Inc., and the author of Warehousing Isn't Just About Storage Anymore. "It is where companies provide differentiated customer service on a mass scale."
The WMS not only executes orders, it also creates, collects, and distributes the information created when inventory is picked, packed, shipped, and billed. As enterprises look beyond the four walls of their warehouses, that information is crucial to providing the service that today's customer demands. "If you don't know what you have, where it is, and where it's going, managing the supply chain isn't going to do you much good," says Patrick Majure, director of sales and marketing at Majure Data.
Adds Newton, "The benefits of implementing the right WMS application have moved from nice-to-have to must-have in order for most companies to stay competitive in a global economy in which the customer rules."
As before, those benefits can be quantified, and include productivity increases from 20 to 30% and inventory and shipping accuracy rates that exceed 99%. Most users will also see better utilization of floor space, inventory reductions, fewer data entry errors, and reductions in the amount of inventory lost to shrinkage.
At the same time that WMS delivers these and other benefits, the software is being adapted to the changing demands of the warehouse, and the changing demands of customers. These enhancements range from packaged software that costs less to Web-deployed and Web-hosted software that reduce costs in still other ways. They also include true web-enabled WMS applications that can communicate across the facilities of a single business, across a supply chain, or across the Internet to customers who want information about the availability of inventory and the status of their orders.
In other developments, vendors are also adding yard management, transportation management, and order management modules to expand the capabilities of the WMS.
New warehouse optimization programs, also known as warehouse planning or WPS systems, define the constraints, limitations, and throughput capacities of a facility, much as supply chain planning programs look at the over-all capabilities of an enterprise. These new systems allow a warehouse manager to forecast and identify the bottlenecks in a picking plan in order to dynamically manage the work flow, space, and human resources in the facility.
The WMS is also expanding in scope outside of the four walls of individual warehouses to deploy inventory across multiple facilities. Typically, this ties in with other software systems including supply chain planning and replenishment, customer relationship, customer relationship programs, and ERP systems.
This might also include WMS software programs that are being enhanced to meet the requirements of emerging end users such as third party logistics providers.
In short, they reflect the new demands put on the warehouse and distribution center as enterprises turn to logistics as a strategic weapon to differentiate themselves from their competitors.
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