BY JAMES A. COOKE, EDITOR AT LARGE
SYSTEMS INTEGRATION
Cloud-based WMS:
how friendly?
Despite the hype about their
user-friendliness, cloud-based
warehouse management
systems still may require
systems integration work.
CLOUD-BASED SOFTWARE WAS SUPPOSED TO MAKE DEPLOYMENT AND
installation easier for the user. That’s because the software provider hosts the application on its own servers instead of having the user install it on its premises. When a
user wants access to the application, it’s a simple matter of going to a website.
And with many cloud-based programs, it’s that easy. They require little or no systems integration work because they come with a built-in application programming
interface that allows for data to be exchanged in a variety of formats. Take a transportation management system (TMS), for example. With a TMS, the input is typically
data on shipments for which the application must schedule a carrier. Because that
information may be coming from a variety of sources, the software comes with the
interfaces already in place to accept shipment information in a mix of data formats.
But with warehouse management systems (WMS), it’s different. These systems
typically have multiple “touch points,” where the application has to interface with
various pieces of material handling equipment or other types of software. And no
matter where the WMS resides, that software still has to be configured to accommodate multiple data inputs and outputs.
“Moving WMS to the cloud is sometimes seen as a way to relieve the IT [infor-mation technology] burden and shorten time to value by moving the infrastructure,
setup, and configuration tasks externally to the software solution provider and away
from the internal IT function,” says Mike Howes, vice president of software engineering at the Mason, Ohio-based consulting and systems integration firm Forte.
“This approach does not necessarily take into consideration the complex tasks of
extracting and manipulating the data that need to be loaded into the cloud-based
WMS application.”
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