The Delicate Balance of Functional Flexibility with WMS

The Warehouse Management System (WMS) software implementation space has been plagued with the need for customization, enhancement, extension, or advanced configuration since its inception decades ago. This has led to the current standard where WMS upgrades are monumental, and often career defining events for an organization and its leaders. Why is this true? What changes are large WMS vendors enacting to change this paradigm? What is our perspective? These questions are exactly what this post aims to discuss.

The warehouse is in principle a simple structure with an equally simple mission – receive cardboard boxes and ship said cardboard boxes. While this description is true, the operational nuance and complexity reside in the details. This contradictory truth of a simple, yet complex operation is the backdrop for the push and pull between IT’s desire to leverage standard product functionality and the operation’s ability to enhance which unlocks efficiency and innovation. In nearly every implementation, IT’s request to use only the standard solution ultimately shipwrecks against the rocky coastline of the operation’s ability to showcase significant labor savings, or an improved customer experience, via targeted and strategic enhancements.

There are several forces at play in the WMS space that drive organizations towards enhancement and customization across key functional areas. The first is the reality that most large WMS purveyors are capable of supporting, and actively selling into, warehouses across every modern industry. This means the same WMS must support the catch weight and freshness requirements of the largest food and beverage organizations, while simultaneously supporting the multi-level serialization requirements of the high-tech and life sciences industries. While noble in cause, this results in what we refer to as operational bloat. A concept that describes the bevy of fields and steps users must navigate through to perform their specific tasks, due to the optionality needed to service all industries. Much of the need for customization and enhancement arises because this functional bloat stymies what would otherwise be a very simple, clean, and streamlined user experience. Additionally, the functional bloat within key functions like allocation, putaway, directed work management, and others causes them to become generic for any specific operation. Meaning there is material low-hanging fruit when an operation looks to dial in the functionality for their specific product type, physical layout, material handling equipment, etc. As soon as an operation can state that a $40k change to a common RF screen that reduce two keystrokes saves them $150k yearly across the entire distribution network, challenging the request is neigh impossible. Customizing to build a streamlined user experience, void of unnecessary steps and keystrokes, also simplifies and shortens the onboarding process for new operators. Reduced onboarding and training time is a critical value driver in a space struggling to retain talent. It is easy to understand and rationalize how a WMS implementation with the best IT intentions ultimately results in the operation leveraging a customized solution.

Both sides are correct in their motivations. WMS upgrades are notoriously painful events laden with risk, due in part to the need to uplift prior enhancements to a new and often re-platformed version of the WMS. Conversely, most operations can create large operational efficiencies and materially improve the customer experience with enhancements. The million-dollar question – What has prevented the software vendors from solving this problem?

The WMS vendors are aware of the customization challenge their clients face and have been attempting to resolve for years. They have explored ways to create flexible frameworks that allow an organization to safely twist and contort the WMS to their needs. While the frameworks have succeeded in creating an avenue for localization, it never fully resolved the upgrade dilemma. The most recent attempts now rely on the re-platform each WMS vendor is navigating – A migration to SaaS and Cloud-Native with yearly and automatic upgrades each facility must take, limiting the duration between upgrades and hopefully the impact. This vision is predicated on the idea that an enhancement which leverages standard APIs or standard localization entry/exit points is evergreen. This means the ‘hook’ used to inject the new functionality will be available in perpetuity and never impacted by new standard functionality or updates to the back-end data model or code. While promising in concept, the verdict is still out with regards to where each vendor will draw the line around what can, or can’t, be changed and how those changes remain evergreen in practice several years from now. This brave new world of ambiguous enhancement definition in a SaaS world is, in part, what will determine their success in these efforts.

With supply chain and customer experience more relevant in the boardroom than in recent memory, supply chains are open to leveraging the WMS to create differentiation and competitive advantage. Appetite for something more than the ‘everything to everyone’ reality is strong, and justifiably so. Gone are the days of viewing supply chain and the warehouse as a cost center. Usurped by the realization that the warehouse is now a competitive advantage and customer experience driver individually, and in collaboration with adjacent systems and technologies. We view WMS implementations and upgrades as the beginning of a transformative journey, not an end-state. WMS vendors that embrace the concept of WMS as a flexible platform for change, from which an operation can craft their multi-technology distribution nirvana, while limiting upgrade impacts, will be the most successful in the coming years.