BY JAMES A. COOKE, EDITOR AT LARGE
WMS SOLUTIONS
technologyreview
keeping track of
frozen assets
Several years of double-digit growth left Frozen
Gourmet, a small California frozen food distributor,
scrambling to keep tabs on inventory. Then it learned
about a promising—but untried—new solution.
THREE YEARS AGO, CALIFORNIA-BASED DIStributor Frozen Gourmet Inc. found itself facing the
classic small business growth challenge, at least where its
warehouse operations were concerned. In the past
decade, the distributor’s sales had grown 80 percent—a
welcome development, to be sure, but one that left the
company struggling to keep track of its fast-moving
inventory. As volume grew, the inadequacies of its manual tracking system became increasingly apparent, often
in the form of stock-outs and other inventory errors. Yet
the operation was still too small to justify an expensive
warehouse management system (WMS).
But luck was on the distributor’s side. At about that
time, a supplier tipped it off to a possible solution—
one that had just recently been introduced to the market. The solution promised to give Frozen Gourmet
the inventory-tracking capabilities it needed—and at
a relatively modest cost.
The solution in question was an “on-demand”
WMS recently brought to market by San Francisco-based Smart Turn Inc. Like the warehouse management systems big companies have been using for
years, this new solution was designed to automate
warehouse processes and provide real-time inventory
visibility. But there was one important difference: the
method of delivery. Instead of buying a costly software license and installing the program on its own
servers, Frozen Gourmet would be able to “rent” the
Web-based WMS for a modest monthly fee. The vendor would host and maintain the application on its
own servers, and deliver it over the Internet. There
would be no hardware to buy, no software to install,
and no IT staff to maintain.
In the end, the prospective advantages proved too
much to resist. Frozen Gourmet signed on to become
one of Smart Turn’s first customers.
Fast turnaround
Although they’re marketed to companies of all sizes,
on-demand WMS applications are best suited to simple to moderately complex operations that do not
rely heavily on automation—a profile that Frozen
Gourmet fits to a T. The Redding, Calif.-based distributor employs just 25 people and is strictly a
regional operation, distributing frozen goods to
major grocery stores, convenience stores, and mom-and-pop stores in a territory that stretches from
California’s northern border with Oregon to Yuba
City, Calif., 200 miles to the south. The distributor
mostly handles Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream Holdings
products, which include the Nestlé and Häagen-Dazs
