First of all, Joshila, can you talk us through the different products and services WCS provides?
CSnx is our flagship WMS platform, with functionality and capability offering businesses the most cost-effective way to improve productivity and fulfillment in the warehouse.
CSnx delivers an out of the box warehouse and labour management functionality in the cloud or on-premise, spans: receipt scheduling; receiving; space optimisation; value-added services; cross-docking; pick-by-line/flow-through; inter-site transfers; managed forward pick replenishments; and inventory control and cycle counting in real time.
For outbound operations, the system enhances transport planning; order processing and optimises picking, packing and loading through to shipment of merchandise. CSnx also fits well with others, offering strong integration capabilities and interoperability with other systems, such as ERPs (Latest integration to Syspro and INFOR), TMS, Portals, automation, and robotics, providing inventory visibility to help expedite the movement of products from the manufacturer/supplier to the warehouse and the retailer, or eventually to the end customer.
What sets your company apart as a supplier in your category?
We’re a company that prides itself on our customer relationships, some which span the history of the company. We’re committed to working with customers to develop a product that fully suits their needs both today and tomorrow.
What business sectors are your customers in? Which industry sectors are growing fastest for you?
Predominately we have customers in retail, grocery, distributors and wholesale, manufacturing and 3PL.
Retail grocery is probably one of the fastest growing sectors for WCS. Retailers are facing huge challenges with growing competition, consumer demand and all the demands of e-commerce including the complex legislation around farm to fork traceability.
Our retail customers strive to create competitive advantage around increased speed of delivery. Warehouses – being core to the supply chain – are today under huge strain because of this. WCS offers its customers access to not only best practice techniques, but innovative technology that helps them keep up with the latest technological trends, and sees them meeting the demands of the market.
We have worked with several customers in the last year that have quadrupled their sales volumes and quadrupled again their SKU product ranges – allowing them to grow from a $1.7bn business to a $ 2.1 billion business – all from the same size distribution centre.
The only way they could have achieved this was through the implementation of the latest innovative technology from WCS.
CSnx is a key enabler that allows our customers to achieve their growth and success by growing into a solution and not out of it.
Our customers can adopt technology such as embedded RF, voice and labour management, mobility, asset tracking, booking portal and automatisation and robotics. This allows them to have full visibility of inventory to lot, batch, serial numbers, traceability of full movement of goods, labour management, speed, flexibility to achieve smaller deliveries and better accuracy.
We continue to innovate at WCS, with our technology developed around best practice principles that delivers strong ROI for all our customers.
Which of your core products and solutions are you presenting on your stand at IMHX? Are you launching anything new at the show?
We’ll be talking to stand visitors about CSnx, our flagship WMS in combination with our latest modules available – which includes cost-to-serve, our latest fully integratable module that is currently being used in Australia’s largest independent grocery retailer, Drakes. Tracking costs categorised by activities rather than traditional cost categories was imperative to Drakes.
This activity based costing gives them the ability to identify non-value added activities they are undertaking and implement process improvement.
We’ve now developed a module that all our customers can benefit from.
Why should busy professionals from the warehouse and logistics industry take time out to visit your stand at IMHX?
As an innovative business, CSnx is a key enabler that allows our customers to achieve their growth and success by growing into a solution and not out of it.
Our customers can adopt technology that allows them to have full visibility of inventory to lot, batch, serial numbers, traceability of full movement of goods, labour management, speed, flexibility to achieve smaller deliveries and better accuracy. We are working with Customers on AI pilots as CSnx has the ability to easily extract data to allow for intelligence analysis.
We continue to innovate at WCS, with our technology developed around best practice principles that delivers strong ROI for all our customers.
What do you see as the main benefits to your company from being involved with IMHX?
As previous visitors to IMHX we believe WCS products are an excellent fit for attendees from organisations within retail, grocery, wholesale, food services, distributors, general merchandise, pharmaceuticals, DIY and 3PLs. We believe we can put businesses ahead of the curve with our best-in-breed, next generation WMS offering, that incorporates advanced functionalities including out of the box, with embedded labour, voice, stockless warehouse, consolidated picking for ecommerce, cost to serve
The last IMHX was 2016. How has your business changed since then?
Since 2016 we have seen a continuing interest and adoption off our next generation WMS platform CSnx across our territories with existing customer upgrades, to securing new sites. We have also expanded into the Australian market this year. From a product perspective we have developed and implemented a number of new features, functions and modules. Our focus over the last year has been on expanding integration to robotics (drone inventory count solutions),supplier portal, a cost to serve offering and exploring AI in supply chain.
Can you tell us about your major customer contract wins in the last three years? Do these represent new development areas for your company?
Probably the most significant win for us was a customer in Australia. This is a new market for the company, and we are growing our presence there. As new customers adopt the offering, we have been expanding additional features and functions and modules to cater to territory legislation.
Which other countries do you operate in besides the UK? Which overseas markets are most important for you?
We also operate in Europe, South Africa, North America and have recently added Australia.
It’s three years to the next IMHX. Where do you see your company going in that time?
We’ll continue with the same approach as we have done in previous years, to innovate for our customers, provide them with the capability to meet the challenges of e-commerce and traceability, and to create a product that helps them reduce costs, gain efficiencies and remain competitive.
We will have an increased focus on cost and capturing the real direct and indirect costs associated with managing the inventory and processing customer orders. Providing cost information directly from the WMS for including in integrated cost to serve and direct product profitability models – which continues to be of high interest to our customers.
We are also exploring AI for warehouse operations – as trends suggest that multiple operations in the warehousing and logistics industry are expected to become fully automated over the next decade.
In essence, we continue to have our ‘finger on the pulse’ of the industry’s needs and challenges and our technology will continue to reflect that in the coming years.
CONTACT
WCS
01276 410 144
STAND NUMBER: UK12
Comments are closed.