7 minute read
INFOR
How a cloud-based WMS can future-proof your warehouse
Even when your warehouse operations seem to be running smoothly, there is always room for improvement and a need to stay up to date with innovation, emphasizes Khaled AlShami, Senior Director, Solution Consulting, Middle East & Africa, Infor.
Khaled AlShami, Senior Director, Solution Consulting, Middle East & Africa, Infor.
While steps are taken to keep warehouse operations at peak performance, when fulfilment times and levels are jeopardized, it’s still up to you and your team to race to recover, to ensure actions to get back on track are taken correctly so that product can make its way out the door, and time is always working against you.
If your organization previously reviewed and dismissed the value of moving your warehouse management system (WMS) to the cloud, it’s time to re-evaluate. Decisions that seemed to make sense last year or even last quarter, likely look very different with new challenges emerging over the past several months.
Cloud capabilities
By empowering critical systems like a WMS with cloud capabilities, your organization can scale quickly, maximize productivity, and minimize outages and downtime to prevent bringing the company’s mission-critical operations to its knees.
Losses caused by system outages can be initially staggering and ultimately far-reaching, impacting not only revenue and productivity but also long-term brand value. It’s been estimated that the average cost of IT downtime is US$ 5,600 per minute, with US$ 140,000 per hour on the low end and as much as US$540,000 per hour at the higher end.
Internally absorbing the actions to resolve the issue on-premise and then putting in place actions across the organization to recover from the critical failure and its consequences can derail an organization even further.
SaaS model
However, what if you could offload that preparation, training, and responsibility to a solution partner you can trust to manage it all for you? With choosing a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for your WMS, experts who are contractually committed to ensuring your warehouse stays up and running are shouldering that burden.
Not only can you remove this timeconsuming responsibility from your list, but when a failure of some kind inevitably occurs, you will likely never even experience a disruption.
Such is the type of redundancies and fail-safes that SaaS organizations put in place. But also, with that shift of responsibility, your team can instead focus additional time on other strategic initiatives with higher business value.
By moving from on-premise WMS to the cloud, you can avoid a potentially devastating business impact while simultaneously optimizing your workforce.
Ageing technology stacks
An Infor customer recently found themselves facing an all too familiar story with ageing technology stacks. They relied on a legacy on-premises solution for over 30 years. While it had been dependable for decades, the day the system failed, there were no longer any in-house technicians familiar with the solution and no feasible way to recover.
The organization realized the only logical step forward in that critical moment was a move to the cloud, which not only allowed them to recover, but has now set them up to scale accordingly as the business grows.
In hindsight, it would have been ideal to begin that transition to the cloud years earlier, but they are now benefitting from more than peace of mind.
As warehouse operations grow increasingly complex, making sure your system is always up to date has never been more important to your business.
How to create an agile supply chain
Supply chains must adopt a ‘network approach’, connecting all partners to shared processes, data and metrics, managed within a single platform to succeed
Competitive supply chains must enable a new level of coordinated performance that creates a high-fidelity picture of in-process flows across your extended network. Building the continuous supply chain supports contextual deviations, conveys alerts and drives continuous planning via sense & respond capabilities.
Optimizing multi-party business processes
Supply chains are complex networks where over 80% of the data and processes sit within partner systems. To see and act on the latest picture of your supply chain, your company needs that data from each of your partners, but the
problem is most companies rely solely on an enterprise-centric approach to solve a multi-enterprise problem.
The only way to overcome those limitations is to adopt a ‘network approach’. Connecting all partners to shared processes, data and metrics managed within a single platform creates a single version of truth for all parties.
This allows supply chains to eliminate the data silos and inherent latency in order to reduce the root causes of friction, variability and costs in today’s supply chains, both internally and externally.
Managing product flows
Balancing customer service levels and supply chain costs is nothing new, but customer expectations are more demanding than even before due to how quickly products need to be in market to capture sales and quickly turnaround delivery. Your customers are under their own pressure to meet on-time and in-full (OTIF) delivery and that flows all the way back upstream.
These challenges highlight that today’s supply chain structures simply aren’t equipped to deal with the high demands if partners and systems aren’t providing ‘single truth’ visibility. With solutions that provide real-time visibility and machine learning to assist with predictive sensing of product availability issues, your company can make the needed adjustments to meet customer service agreements.
Advancing supply chin visibility maturity in the organization
How do we define supply chain visibility today? Leaving aside long-term forecasting and planning that depends on insight to meet demand, the operational aspects of the supply chain that we can materially impact with improved and multi-dimensional visibility involve orders, shipments, and inventory.
Obviously, supply chain visibility can’t be achieved from a single data source, or a single set of participants. Just as the old-fashioned supply ‘chain’ is more accurately described as a network today, so a networked solution to building multi-dimensional visibility to that ecosystem offers the best path to value.
A networked visibility approach means that business benefits can be realized across many cross-functional and crossdomain areas.
Cloud-based WMS
The value of visibility
Supply chain visibility frameworks need to recognize the milestone components that make international product flow successful as well as transparency of outbound truck shipments constrained by connectivity to many different carriers.
Collaboration with trading partners is the only way to gain the higher levels of visibility that can significantly improve global supply chain planning and fulfilment operations. To keep production running and customers happy, it is critical to know when expected product availability for fulfilment or consumption is in jeopardy.
Finance & Trade Flows
Volatility in supply chains makes it hard to profitably meet demand. Sourcing is complex, often involves hundreds of partners, and suppliers often don’t have access to adequate capital, causing instability in the supply base.
The majority of inventory, costs, and risks are outside of a single enterprise’s control. Too many siloed systems and not enough shared data make it impossible to reliably meet consumer demands. Companies, with only a few pieces of the puzzle, must scramble to track inventory and provide accurate ETAs.
Automation of supplier payment can help improve supplier relations, optimize working capital, and reduce fees and inefficiencies along the financial supply chain. To automate supplier invoice payments and standardize documentation, companies must transform themselves from silo-based, inward-facing corporate operators to interconnected, highly agile business network orchestrators.
End-to-end visibility & orchestration
Incorporating your supply chains’ ability to sense and respond, orchestrate finance and trade flows, and utilize advanced data centres and artificial intelligence is crucial for providing transparent visualization of supply chain dynamics.
In addition to these pillars, next generation control towers, or control centres, deliver pervasive end-toend visibility by capturing impact, interconnections, repercussions, and options. They synchronize participants to help dissolve a functionally siloed approach to fulfilment.
Once organizations adopt a networked solution that allows all parties to share and see real-time updates, the heightened sense and response capabilities allow them to further close the loop and develop the continuous supply chain—Khaled AlShami.
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