Upgrading your WMS: Little pain, lots of gain
Here are two proven approaches you can take when upgrading your warehouse management system.
By Bob Trebilcock, Executive Editor -- Modern Materials Handling, 2/18/2009
It’s not often that a warehouse management (WMS) or warehouse control system (WCS) gets replaced, says Bill Tyng, principal consultant at Forte. Five years is the expected life of a system, but it’s not uncommon for end users to stretch the life of their WMS to 10 years. That’s because these systems are not only expensive, they’re also mission-critical. No one wants to risk losing business if a new WMS goes on the fritz.
But eventually, all systems do have to be replaced.
After five years, a WMS grows long in the tooth and shows a few wrinkles.
- New technology has passed them by;
- Customized add-ons that have to be separately maintained are now standard features on new systems; and
- Vendors may no longer support that version of the product.
In some cases, the vendor might not even be around. “In that case, you have to hire outside support and your costs escalate,” says Tyng.
Done right, Tyng adds, the benefits of new functionality will not only outweigh the cost of the system, but deliver cost savings. A little pain may deliver a lot of gain. What then is the right way to upgrade a system? According to Tyng, you can take two different approaches to upgrading your WMS.
Approach #1. The first, and simplest, approach is to stick with your current vendor’s product suite. “In that case, upgrading the system can be as simple as putting in few CDs,” says Tyng. “I recently was in a facility where the IT guy upgraded the system the night before in two hours. I know that it happens.”
For those who aren’t that lucky, the process is more complicated, especially for facilities with highly customized applications. That’s because each customization has to be tested separately to make sure it still works with the new software.
For that reason, the most important part of an upgrade is to have a roll back plan, a way to return the system to the original version of the software if complications surface with the new WMS.
The most common approach is to create a test environment by keeping the original version of the software on one server, and installing the new instance on a second server running in parallel. “We will load the new software, and then feed it the same data as we’re feeding the original system to make sure that everything is working the way it should,” says Tyng. “That way, you protect your production environment until you transition everything over to the new server.”
Approach #2. Another approach is to do a phased-in implementation, adding one area of functionality at a time. “When we take a phased-in approach, we start with the receiving area because that’s the gateway into all the other processes. You want to know it’s right before you tackle anything else.”
In a phased-in implementation, both the old WMS and the new WMS communicate with an ERP or order management system. New functionality is added one department or process at a time until the new system is running the entire facility. “It’s technologically a lot more challenging to do it this way, but it’s less disruptive to your operations,” says Tyng.
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