Performance-driven execution: the next wave for WMS

By Bob Trebilcock, Editor at Large -- Modern Materials Handling, 5/24/2005

Supply chain optimization and analysis, the next wave in inventory management and order fulfillment, was on display at the Provia Software (616-285-3311) user conference in Tuscon earlier this month.

Provia calls this new approach performance-driven execution. Other leading WMS providers are creating their own terms for their version of the solution. But all are pointed in much the same direction.

“Performance-driven execution brings together supply chain execution functionality, like warehouse, transportation and labor management, with real-time analysis and feed back that allows DC managers to constantly monitor and re-optimize their operations,” says John Pulling, Provia’s chief operating officer. “It’s a combination of execution, analysis and optimization tools.”

Behind this new push is the fact that the best WMS providers have all gotten too good at what they do.

Rightly or wrongly, the market perceives that little separates one best-of-breed vendor from another when it comes to the basic WMS functionality required to receive, putaway, pick, pack and ship in the warehouse and distribution center.

As a result, industry leaders, including Provia, are developing new ways to differentiate themselves from the pack. One way to do that is to push the boundaries of what constitutes a WMS by bringing together technologies that previously operated in their own silos. These include planning, optimization and business intelligence.

In Provia’s model, a group of orders drops into an execution system. Today, warehouse, transportation, yard and labor management systems might each look at those orders and figure out how to do their part. At the end of the day, information about what happened can be accessed for better planning in the future.

In the performance-driven execution model, an optimization engine would analyze those orders and create the optimal way to pick, pack and ship the orders. That plan would then be passed on to the WMS, TMS, YMS and LMS systems.

As tasks are completed, information is fed back in real time to another engine that can provide real-time feedback about what just happened. That information can then be sent as an alert to a DC manager who can address an immediate problem. It can also be fed back into the optimization engine to create a new plan. Or the information can be used for longer range planning.