By adopting cloud WMS, warehouses can also improve staff efficiency and mitigate challenges around training, affirms Vishal Minocha, Sr. Director, WMS Product Management and Go to Market, Infor, the New York-headquartered multi-national enterprise software company and a global leader in specialized business cloud software.
He spoke recently to LogisticsGulf.com in an exclusive interview.
LogisticsGulf.com (LG): What are the biggest challenges in the warehousing sector amid Covid-19, and how can technology help?
Vishal Minocha (VM): Based on conversations with a lot of global warehousing customers around the world including in the Middle East, the biggest issue customers are facing with their warehouses is capacity disruption.
Major ongoing trends such as e-commerce are having a significant impact on warehouses and the way they manage their capacity, while Covid-19 has forced many warehouses to handle a sudden rise in volume and throughput for certain types of product, such as masks and medical supplies, and a decline in others.
Looking at e-commerce in more detail, in some industries it was there for a long time but that trend has accelerated, and even sectors such as grocery and packaged food – which did not have e-commerce as their normal channel – are being forced to adapt to e-commerce.
From a warehousing perspective, the way e-commerce and traditional orders are handled is completely different. E-commerce orders are typically smaller, whereas traditional store fulfillment orders are larger but less frequent.
The way warehouses process these in terms of the allocations and the picking is completely different. If a warehouse is handling both e-commerce and traditional orders from a single facility, it needs a flexible WMS system which can handle both, and we have that flexibility in our WMS.
With respect to the capacity issue, one of the major advantages of using a cloud WMS is that is allows for rapid up-scaling and downscaling of computing warehouse capacity. With cloud WMS we don’t have to go through the traditional deployment and procurement of the hardware: It is already provisioned and deployed on the cloud. This means that provisioning for a new customer takes days rather than weeks or months.
Cloud WMS becomes even more powerful when combined with automation, which allows your computing capacity to auto scale as per capacity demand, which keeps the warehouse running at an optimum level.
By adopting cloud WMS, warehouses can also improve staff efficiency and mitigate challenges around training. If a warehouse is using traditional WMS, with various components from different vendors, it can create challenges in terms of ensuring sufficient staff are trained to use the various systems.
If someone is off sick or on leave, a warehouse can easily find itself in a situation where there is nobody on-site with the know-how to use a certain piece of software. Conversely, with an intuitive WMS, it is far easier to have a large pool of staff trained and able to use the software.
LG: What specific requests have customers made during Covid-19?
VM: One of the main things we’re helping customers with is the ability to cope with extra volume. If they’re cloud customers we can spin off an environment quickly for them, and in 2-3 days they can have an environment up and running.
LG: Will the pandemic speed up digital transformation? If so how?
VM: I believe it will. From the warehousing perspective we are already seeing the impact of digital transformation. It’s an enabler that benefits all areas of a business, from the operations to customer experience, and warehouses are no different. E-commerce itself is a result of digital transformation and it will keep growing at a massive rate, especially during the pandemic.
For warehouses this means increased volume, and this is likely to encourage some warehouses to look at adding some degree of automation to their warehouse to augment their workforce, helping them to perform essential jobs such as picking more efficiently.
In this industry, speed is of essence, and solutions that give you an edge are important. But warehouses must also be able to cope with black swan events such as Covid-19.
As mentioned, we are seeing disruptions in supply chains due to the pandemic and some warehouses need some level of new functionality. Tomorrow there might be another black swan event, so how do customers ensure that their warehouse management system keeps up with disruptions that might happen in the future.
The only way to keep up with all the disruption and change that is happening in warehousing is with cloud WMS. With this we provide continuous innovations every four to six weeks, which are all updated automatically. This is a big value proposition for customers.
LG: What savings can be made by a warehouse typically?
VM: It really depends on the starting point. We have seen customers get as much as 20-30% productivity improvements by adopting cloud WMS. This is mainly due to the faster time to value because it’s much easier to deploy in the cloud with our agility and implementation methodology, as opposed to 12-18 months for implementation of tradition on-site systems involving hardware and software.
We use an agile implementation method with more of a continuous delivery type approach, so we go live in phases allowing the customer to start reaping the benefits of their investment sooner. We aim to get 60% of functionality in a matter of weeks. The next 30% is about fine-tuning, optimizing the warehouse and ensuring we are doing warehouse transactions in the optimal way.
LG: What are some of the obstacles to customers adopting cloud?
VM: The warehousing sector was relatively late in moving to the cloud and remains at a nascent stage. One of the big reasons for this is that some warehouses are in remote locations and there was concern about the connectivity and bandwidth to public cloud providers. This was a big hindrance, but it gets better every year.
Cybersecurity was also perceived as a challenge, but with the amount of investment the public cloud providers are putting into security, and the investment we are making, it is no longer an issue to deter warehousing companies from migrating their management systems to the cloud.
