Search and post jobs for the Multichannel Merchant. Including jobs for brand & agency marketers, e-commerce, catalog marketers, ops & fulfillment, direct marketing and more.
Your distribution center needs to be able to control inventory movements, from receiving and put-away to picking and packing, as well as the management of returns. A warehouse management system helps you do that.
A WMS can also serve as a key link in the supply chain, including materials management, product allocations, and shipment planning. What's more, a WMS typically offers workforce planning and productivity analysis.
But unless you are a third-party logistics service bureau focused only on warehousing and fulfillment, your order management or enterprise resource planning system may be sufficient for handling your inventory.
Most order management systems are designed to handle all of the inventory movement and fulfillment activities required by most catalog or e-commerce companies. Though ERP systems were not originally intended to encompass these functions, many of them have added such features in the past few years due to the growth of e-commerce as a sales channel.
Of course, the opposite is also true: Some newer e-commerce systems deliberately avoid warehouse management functions, assuming that you will integrate with a WMS.
So how do you know if you need a separate WMS? If you have warehouse and fulfillment functionality in your order management suite, you need to determine how much better a WMS will do the tasks your order management or ERP system can already handle, and how much more efficient it will allow you to be.
This is of course tied into the basic ROI question: How much will you save by implementing a WMS compared to the costs of implementation?
Before addressing that question, though, remember that whatever theoretical payback you calculate must take into account challenges you will encounter in implementing and integrating the WMS into your current systems architecture. Getting a WMS to function completely in sync with an order management system in particular is fraught with difficulty.
Why? For one, the logic of any given WMS may not be consistent with the logic of any given order management solution. Take “line-item allocation,” for example. There is no universal standard by which allocations of line-items on an order are processed among the various order management systems themselves. So expecting a WMS to automatically match the way your system currently handles this is probably unrealistic.
At least one major order management system does not do a “hard” allocation on line-items until they are batched for picking. But if the WMS is doing the batching, then it most likely needs to be modified to hard allocate when the orders are ported to the WMS.
Moreover, not all systems handle the relationship of line-items to orders in the same way, which can have a significant impact on the way an order is picked, packed, and shipped.
Worse still, you can't anticipate every mismatch in the logic of the two types of systems. Only careful testing using multiple inventory management scenarios can reveal them all.
And some unanticipated modification of either the WMS or the order management system may be required to get both systems singing in key on the same page. Be sure to allow time for this in implementation.
Indeed, the industry is haunted by horror stories of otherwise well-run companies that encountered massive operational snafus in the hectic holiday season, with tens of thousands of unshipped orders, double-shipped orders, incorrect orders, and every other conceivable kind of fulfillment mistake — all caused by a failure to get the order management system and the WMS integrated properly.
Pay particular attention to how backorders and returns are to be handled between the two systems, as these are two major points of vulnerability.
WMS benefits
A WMS can provide many benefits that your current inventory management system may not address as effectively, if at all. Probably the most common of these is the management of warehouse automation. If you want to employ pick-to-light, carousels, automated picking, or complex conveyor and gate/diversion management, you most likely have a WMS in your future.
The same goes for radio frequency workforce management or the use of handheld or truck-mounted units. And if your supply chain partners require support for RFID in a multichannel environment, you're almost surely in the market for a WMS.
Another major reason for implementing a WMS is improved space utilization. This can range from directed put-away or random put-away to more sophisticated slotting. (See “Slotting for dollars” on page 44.)
Also related is more efficient receiving and put-away, including automatic put-away, provided the supplier offers an advanced shipment notice (ASN) and item-level barcodes. And if the supplier does not, your own WMS may be the best way to generate barcode labels at the item and bin level.
