By Roberto Michel · April 12, 2021 Warehouse execution software (WES) has been one of most high profile and rapidly evolving software categories for companies with DC operations in recent years, eclipsing much of the attention on the more mature category of warehouse management system (WMS) software. But to meet the needs of today’s fast-paced fulfillment centers, a WMS and WES combination may be needed. What’s more, say a couple of sponsors with virtual exhibits at ProMatDX, it’s not just about being a one-stop source for WMS and WES, but also taking a cohesive platform approach that allows users to deploy what is needed while doing away with integration worries. WMS has been around for decades as the main system for managing warehouse inventory and orders, and governing tasks like receiving, put away, picking, and packing. It remains the core management solution for many DCs, though older WMS deployments may lack functionality in areas like waveless order release. The WES category, on the other hand, is newer. It grew out the need to support waveless order release, sometimes referred to as continuous order release, in way that “level loads” processing through multiple types of warehouse automation and zones to smoothly orchestrate the flow of work. What user organizations need, is not one or the other, but a pre-integrated solution that can be deployed quickly and flexibly, say at least two ProMatDX sponsors. Honeywell Intelligrated, for one, is talking up its platform approach for WMS combined with WES. Elisaveta Dimova, senior offering manager for Honeywell Intelligrated’s WMS solution, points out that Honeywell’s Momentum WMS is already available standalone, but it’s now it fully integrated with the company’ Momentum WES. Additionally, later this year, Honeywell will be working to add its labor management software to the pre-integrated bundle. Dimova explains that while WMS is a mature application category with many established vendors, there remains a need to simplify and speed up deployment of the full range of applications DC operators may need to manage all resources in a warehouse. “It just makes sense to be able to offer an end-to-end, operational solutions for our customers,” says Dimova. While Honeywell Intelligrated can deploy just the WES for a customer, or just the WMS, or just its labor management application, the integrated Momentum platform is aimed at flexibly streamlining deployments for operations that want a fuller range of functionality under the same architecture, user interface and log-on, and with no integration or migration hurdles. “We can integrate to whatever system a customer prefers, but a key benefit of this approach is that by bundling these solutions together, users can achieve the operational efficiencies they need more quickly, rather than needing to stitch together solutions,” says Dimova. “When we, as a vendor, provide all these systems and have them packaged to work together, we can leverage the data that needs to go between systems to the best extent possible,” Dimova says. “That means we can provide our customers with metrics, performance indicators, and actionable alerts that we would not otherwise be able to do when we’re working with different [third-party] systems. Ultimately, that [a unified dashboard] is one of the biggest values from this bundled approach.” At Softeon, offering WMS and WES as a unified platform isn’t new, though it’s a point of differentiation the software vendor is stressing at ProMatDX. As Dan Gilmore, chief marketing officer for Softeon explains, Softeon’s approach make use of its services-based software architecture that breaks either WMS or WES functions into a shared component library, from which needed components can be mixed and matched to meet user needs. While some of Softeon’s users will opt for both full WMS and full WES from Softeon, the component architecture also allows a small piece of WES-level functionality such as communication with picking subsystems, to be added to WMS, or a WMS-level function like compliance labelling to be added to the WES. “This shared component library that allows us to tailor the implementation exactly to what an organization is looking for,” says Gilmore. WES is maturing as a category, Gilmore adds. One sign of this is that some user companies are finding value in WES as a standalone solution for optimizing processes in largely manual facilities, as opposed to deploying WES to govern order release and flow for a warehouse automation project. WES remains a highly competitive market with vendors who come at WES from different directions, including WMS vendors, major warehouse automation providers that have extensive software capabilities, as well as warehouse integration providers with WES software and expertise. There is a blurring of the lines between the WMS and WES that has long existed and will likely remain, and now the market is also seeing more vendors tout a bundled approach to WMS and WES, with the aim of offering users the flexibility to quickly deploy what their operations need.
Think of this trend as a flexible bundling of WMS and WES. Some WMS or WES vendors may counter that their software footprints have covered this need for some time, but at ProMatDX, at least a couple of sponsors are stressing how their approaches to combining WMS and WES can improve a DC’s ability to manage warehouse resources and fulfillment processes in a cohesive yet flexible way.
A combined solution also has the effect of creating better dashboards, metrics, and alerts, adds Dimova, in that WES visibility into the progress of work through automated systems gives managers more data points and insights into the overall progress of work being carried out by machines or by warehouse associates, rather than having to jump between dashboards in different applications.
While WES can help level load and smooth the flow for automated DCs, Gilmore points out that WES is evolving to be of value in more lightly automated environments, such as optimizing the flow of orders and inventory through put walls, or doing labor resource management simulations and recommendations for a manual operation. “If you take away the automated equipment from the equation, you can still use WES to plan for and dynamically allocate resources,” says Gilmore.
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