Working with on-demand WMS

White House Custom Colour has streamlined warehouse functions and reduced physical inventory time with an on-demand warehouse management system.

By Bob Trebilcock, Editor at Large -- Modern Materials Handling, 7/18/2007

What if you have a relatively small warehouse or limited IT resource but still need a warehouse management system (WMS)? 

If you’re Mike Durand, warehouse manager for White House Custom Colour, a processor of digital photography images in South Saint Paul, Minn., you subscribe to an on-demand WMS. 

“We needed help managing our inventory,” says Durand. “And, we didn’t want to deal with the issues associated with implementing a software solution that has to be updated by the vendor all the time. Going on-demand looked like it would work for us.” 

An on-demand WMS: is hosted centrally by a solution provider and accessed by the user over the Internet. The user pays a monthly subscription fee just like signing up for cable TV. 

On-demand software has been a fixture of the transportation management (TMS) and supply chain management (SCM) software space for a number of years. In part, that’s because transportation and supply chain management are collaborative processes involving a number of external partners. Having an external partner provide the software feels like a natural part of the process. 

But the on-demand model has been slow to come to the WMS market. That has begun to gradually change, as several providers, including SmartTurn, a division of Navis, 7Hills and ClickCommerce have all launched on-demand solutions.  

How do they work?

Durand says he has reduced the amount of time it takes him to do a physical inventory by 94% and decreased the amount of administrative labor in his warehouse by 60 hours per month. 

“Our warehouse stores and ships all the consumables used by our lab,” Durand says. “Prior to this system, I was doing inventory every morning, and maintaining the record on Excel spreadsheets that had to be updated three times a week. As soon as I pulled an order, the inventory was out of date.” 

Last Christmas, for instance, “we ran out of stock on the boards on which we print digital photographs for one of our major customers,” says Durand. That led to a significant number of backorders. And, it also led Durand to look for an automated solution. 

Today, inventory and order fulfillment is managed and directed by the WMS. Orders are now scanned as inventory is pulled for shipment to the lab, updating the WMS in real time. 

The result: Along with reducing the amount of time required to physically count and manage inventory, Durand says he has streamlined warehouse functions and accommodated business growth all while improving inventory accuracy. 

“I simply couldn’t have done that with a paper-based system,” says Durand.