BY IAN HOBKIRK
WMS
technologyreview
This story first appeared in the Special Issue 2014 edition of CSCMP’s Supply Chain Quarterly, a journal of thought leadership
for the supply chain management profession and a sister publication to AGiLE Business Media’s DC VELOCITY. Readers can
obtain a subscription by joining the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (whose membership dues include the
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more information, visit www.SupplyChainQuarterly.com.
Executing the
omnichannel vision
ANYONE IN THE SUPPLY CHAIN
world who’s attended a conference or
leafed through a supply chain journal this
year is aware that the consumer goods
industry is obsessed with “omnichannel
fulfillment.” The concept of omnichannel fulfillment encompasses many things,
but at the top of the list is the ability for
a retailer to use store inventory to fill
e-commerce orders in certain situations.
I don’t recall the industry being this focused on a single
idea since the days of the Walmart-driven radio-frequency
identification (RFID) mandates in the mid-2000s. This
current trend is, of course, different from the RFID craze
in a key way: RFID in its initial iterations was a technology
without a business case, while for many retailers, omnichannel fulfillment initially was a business concept that
lacked a supporting technology set.
The good news, however, is the emergence of two key
technologies that are now being used by a number of pioneering retailers with success. The first, distributed order
management (DOM) software, handles the complex task
of determining which orders to fill from distribution center (DC) inventory versus store inventory. The second,
a modified version of warehouse management software
(WMS) called “in-store WMS,” enables the execution of
those orders, which includes picking, packing, and shipping
Omnichannel retailing, or
using store inventory to fill
e-commerce orders, is one of
today’s hottest trends. Here
are two technologies that can
help companies operate in this
new environment.
