The adage “Better the Devil you know” does not necessarily apply to a warehouse management system
Two executives from SaaS warehouse management system provider Snapfulfil look at the benefits of a best of breed WMS as opposed to a home grown system.
Putting the well versed cost benefits of a best of breed WMS aside for a moment, there is an inherent danger on too much reliance on your own IT and development resources. Gavin Clark, Snapfulfil Commercial Director / CCO explains: “We often meet companies that have terrific in-house systems, but are reliant on a single person or small group of developers, which has the potential to create high levels of risk. What happens if these individuals leave the company or retire? Do they take their system secrets to the IT grave?”
He continues “The main benefits to companies of all sizes is that commercial WMS providers are able to offer shared resources across their whole business, but also shared input across thousands of users on product features which allows the acceleration of application features and consolidation of new ideas.”
Kirk Anderson VP North American Sales corroborates this point: “Replacing a home grown system rarely comes down to the Cost / Benefit Analysis. The biggest cost / risk is indeed the eventual loss of your IT staff. Green Screen technology (Cobol, RPG, etc ) although it works well is antiquated and the IT staff that understand the coding language are a of diminishing availability. It’s not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’ your IT team responsible for this home grown solution will no longer be playing an active role within your company. Schools are no longer teaching these languages and platform companies like IBM can all too easily ‘sunset’ the technology platforms these solutions rely on.”
Kirk also adds: “A home grown system does have the advantage of being custom tailored to your operations but then again are your operations following best practices in industry? Many of our Snapfulfil Software as a Service clients find following a packaged WMS dramatically improves efficiency by simply changing their process to utilize these proven practices/processes”.
Turning to the cost benefits, Snapfulfil clients tend to see a 15-30% operation improvement moving to a Radio Frequency (RF) directed solution from a paper based / manual system. This typically pays for the WMS solution itself via staff reduction or redirection to other value added activities.
Kirk Anderson points out: “When looking at a commercial WMS, they are not all the same. You’ll find there are different solutions for Small/Medium sized businesses (SMB’s) through to Enterprise clients. There are also a wide range of costs to consider including: Software License, Maintenance, Support, Implementation Services, Host System Integration, Training, Upgrades/Upgrade services, Server Hardware associated database software costs, RF Hardware Devices, RF Site Survey/Access Points, IT team to manage, configuration/modifications, etc”.
A further benefit of utilising Snapfulfil is it’s No Capex Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, that is hosted for you and requires little to no IT staff or hardware to manage at your facility. For further information, contact gavin.clark@snapfulfil.com in the UK or kirk.anderson@snapfulfil.com in the US
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