zone. And warehouse management soft-
ware increasingly needs to integrate with
outside partners’ systems as well, to build a
complete view of supply chain operations.
“There are big gains to be made in
interoperability,” Dickinson says. “Not like
in Industry 4.0 or the Internet of Things,
but in a connected ecosystem of fulfillment
software, so modular software units have
an ‘awareness’ of how what they’re suggesting connects to other pieces.”
NO MORE “FAILURE TO
COMMUNICATE”
To see the advantages that a social WMS
can bring to an operation, you need look
no further than RK Logistics, a Fremont,
California-based third-party logistics service provider (3PL). Until recently, the
firm had been using a dated software system that performed to its original specifications just fine but was now struggling to
keep up with the evolving demands of an
e-commerce age.
RK Logistics knew it had to expand its
capabilities to provide fulfillment solutions
for the growing number of RK clients who
were using online retailers and e-commerce marketplaces, and the key to that
growth was finding software that could
easily exchange data with other systems,
the company says.
“Pulling orders, shipping orders, man-
aging inventory—all that is pretty well
developed and hasn’t changed much over
the last 20 years,” RK Logistics President
Rock Magnan says. “But what has changed
is the need for your customer and your
customer’s customer to interface with your
WMS—and to place orders—in real time.”
Specifically, the company needed a WMS
platform that could integrate with a broad
array of software programs. “Inside the
building, it still needs to interface with
functions like our accounting system, labor
around it? A modern WMS needs to
do more than just manage a ware-
house; it needs to interface with
other technology inside the DC as
well as with systems used by outside
customers.
WMS SOFTWARE BECOMES
MORE “AWARE”
To meet the demands of today’s
e-commerce operations, many
experts recommend a “social”
WMS—one that exchanges data
easily with other warehouse software as well as with outside partners’ and customers’ systems. That
can require many connections; the
number of logistics software platforms used in DCs has multiplied in
recent years with the advent of new
offerings such as warehouse control
systems (WCS), warehouse execution systems (WES), labor management systems (LMS), and enterprise
resource planning (ERP) software.
Together, those systems are
designed to automate material handling operations and help DCs cope
with the rapid growth of e-commerce and omnichannel operations, which are forcing fulfillment
centers to ship high volumes of
small orders (to individual consumers) instead of large orders to a
small number of retail stores, says
Mark Dickinson, director of enterprise solutions at material handling
solutions provider SSI Schaefer.
To tackle that challenge, the best
WMS software will connect data
from various platforms to create an
interactive web, he says. For example, a WMS could allow a WES to
send a query to an LMS, and then
use what it “learns” to match the
workload with the available labor—
for example, sending a queue of
orders to a part of the warehouse
with plenty of staff on hand instead
of to an already-overburdened
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