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WMS in the Cloud – From Skeptic to Believer

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WMS in the Cloud

When it comes to WMS in the cloud, I generally find that people fall into two camps:

1) it will never work;

2) this is a great idea!

Generally, it’s Operations in the first camp and IT in the second. Why? Because Operations folks are from Mars and IT folks are from Jupiter (yes, that’s a joke).

For most of us practitioners, cloud is really nothing new. We used to call it client/server. The only real difference is the server is not in our data center or on our LAN like it used to be. As with many “new” ideas this is not something brand new and groundbreaking, it’s really just an improvement on an old idea.

From Skeptic to Believer

WMS in the Cloud Skeptic

I was once in the Operations camp of thinking that it will never work. Now I have to admit that I have joined the IT camp, but not for all the same reasons the IT folks did. Sure, I love the IT benefits of not having yet another operating system and database server to manage and not having to deal with patches, layered software, maintenance agreements, etc. Not to mention the promise of upgrades just happening automatically in the background. What made me a believer in the possibility of WMS in the cloud was seeing it work when one of our clients actually made a cloud-based WMS run a conveyor system successfully (with proper up front thinking and design). And, my final skepticism was flushed out of my mind after attending JDA Focus 2013 and talking with many people who had great ideas on where to intelligently use a cloud-based WMS approach.

Typical Objections

What most Operations people really dislike about the thought of a cloud-based WMS is “What will I do when the Internet connection goes down?” And there are still some IT people (usually in Support Desk roles) who say “How will we deal with latency of Internet connections?” Both are great points and the truth is you can usually design around them. All you really need to do is design your process and on-site control systems to work so that they don’t have to have a real time connection to your WMS.

Enter the Warehouse Control System (WCS)

The WCS was a concept that I first heard about in the early 1990s. The company I worked for at the time even created a WCS product. The WCS is essentially a sub-system that is a slave to the WMS. It lets the WMS take some important tasks/functions and pass them off to another system to get it done. [Wow, flashback – I think the Amiga computer system actually did this back in the 1980s and true geeks were really excited about it at the time!]

Think about how you can hand off work that needs to be real-time and interactive to a sub-system like a WCS. If you make sure that no critical, real-time interactions are required, you have figured out how to put your WMS in the cloud; making IT happy and keeping your real time control systems local so they won’t slow you down. This addresses the typical objection, but of course there are other considerations for WMS in the cloud – Supply Chain Digest has covered these nicely in a recent article.

Personally, I see a new world where the WMS is hosted and truly starts to focus on “management” and the WCS systems become best of breed at doing what they do best. Some WMS vendors are already making acquisitions and investments to position themselves for this and it’s very exciting. This is what is truly needed to bring the WMS into the reactive model of thinking that is very long overdue (see http://www.reactivemanifesto.org/ for more on that).

The next time someone tells you to put your WMS in the cloud, think about how much your world might improve execution-wise if you are able to truly embrace this model. Heck, we may not have a choice eventually, so we might as well make the best of it!

WMS in the Cloud believer

Have a run in (good or bad) with WMS in the cloud? Email us your story – we’d love to include you in a future post on Open Sky’s Chains of Command blog.

The post WMS in the Cloud – From Skeptic to Believer appeared first on Open Sky Group.


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