The Rise of Integrations in Warehouse Operations
Over the past decade, warehouse operators have increased their investment in integrations to connect their warehouse management systems to other technology solutions. What has caused this increase?
1. Increased demand: With the exponential growth of e-commerce, order volumes have surged. Customers expect fast, accurate order fulfillment and their brand loyalty is tied to this expectation. Today, warehouses are under high pressure to deal with changing demand, high rates of returns from online sales and inventory turnover rates, as well as the proliferation of SKUs.
2. Need to control operating costs: Warehouses now depend on technology to fill the labor gap, as well as to operate more productively and efficiently while reducing waste. By leveraging material handling, robotics, IoT, other modern technologies and systems, this is possible when connected to the WMS.
3. Need for competitive advantage: Especially true in the 3PL industry, one of the most intense pressures when attempting to win and retain business is controlling operational costs. Connecting to other solutions to help minimize manual, inefficient, error-prone operations and boost efficiency and productivity is a necessity.
4. Need to meet customer expectations: With the fast pace of order fulfillment, warehouse operators need help from modern technology to deal with inventory, process and ship orders on time and accurately.
In partnering with clients to help solve their technology needs, we routinely hear about their challenges and angst in dealing with integrations, including electronic data interchange (EDI).
Integrations with Traditional WMS Can Be Challenging and Costly
Traditional warehouse management systems have often required custom coding by their internal IT resource teams or leveraged third party integrators to connect with other solutions. Clients were often not well versed in providing the requirements for integrations and found the long development times and resource-intensive process to be frustrating and costly.
In some cases, with traditional WMS, middleware was leveraged to facilitate communication between different systems. The ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes involved extracting data from one system then transforming it into a compatible format for use in another system. This effort was often scheduled as batch jobs. This also involved longer timelines and cost.
While some traditional warehouse management systems do offer web services or APIs, they are frequently limited in flexibility and capabilities. Significant technical expertise is usually required when using APIs to handle authentication, data mapping, and error handling.
Integrations with traditional WMS may take months to complete. Adding extensive testing and debugging efforts that are needed to ensure a seamless operation and the timeline and cost issues become amplified. This delays the realization of the benefits of integration.
Warehouse operators frequently highlight the need for integrations but are cautious about the need for custom coding, specialized technical skills needed by IT resources and ongoing expense. Because traditional WMS integrations tend to often be rigid, they are problematic to scale or modify as business needs change. This can be especially challenging for 3PLs who deal with multiple clients.
Integrations Are Easier with a Low Code Application Platform-Based WMS
Low code application platforms are built differently from traditional software development platforms. Using pre-built connectors and templates, there is only minimal need for custom coding from IT professionals with specialized skills. This enables integrations to be more easily adapted to changing business requirements and new systems added or existing integrations adapted. By using modular, reusable integration components, the amount of downtime and cost can be reduced, and development and maintenance costs lowered.
Need faster time to market? Low code application platforms decrease the cost, integration timeline, and need for experienced resources for developing an integration. This approach can produce another vital benefit. LCAPs encourage collaboration between technical and business users. This can be useful in ensuring a better alignment between integrations and operational needs. To reduce the communication gap, business users can be incorporated in the development process, accelerating the implementation process.
Advantages of Integrating with a Low Code Application Platform-Based WMS
With a low code application platform-based warehouse management system, your company will benefit from notable strategic advantages
- Enables faster, more cost-effective, scalable integrations
- Encourages collaboration between operational users and IT resources to develop well-aligned integrations to meet operational needs
- Provides a faster path to market
- Provides a competitive advantage to appeal to new customers
- Ensures the digital flow of accurate, real-time data throughout the operation to minimize manual operations, reduce errors, facilitate throughput, and meet customer needs
Integrating with the Latest Technologies
Still using a legacy warehouse management system? You may want to consider replacing it.
Legacy WMS are built on outdated technologies. They may be incompatible with modern software and systems and usually lack robust API support. This makes it difficult to connect with other applications. Because they are often built on a monolithic architecture, legacy warehouse management systems can be inflexible and hard to modify for integration purposes.
Thinking about customizing a legacy WMS to support integrations? Get ready to open your wallet and pack your patience. Customizing a legacy warehouse management system often requires significant coding, a venture that can prove costly and time-consuming. In legacy WMS, data may be isolated or siloed. This can make it difficult to share data seamlessly between disparate systems. In addition, integrations involving legacy WMS may require manual extraction and input which may lead to errors and inefficiencies.
If you are considering an investment in modern technologies including robotics, artificial intelligence, IoT, or machine learning, to name but a few, tread carefully. These modern technologies are difficult, time consuming, and often cost-prohibitive to integrate with legacy warehouse management systems.
For legacy WMS, developing and maintaining integrations typically is expensive. Custom code development must be done by experienced IT resources. It may prove to be both challenging and expensive to find software developers with the required expertise to work on outdated technologies. Often developing integrations with legacy warehouse management solutions can take considerable time. To ensure that the integrations are working properly, extensive testing and debugging are required, and this may extend the integration timeline.
Other issues that warrant special consideration are security and compliance. In older systems, there may be security vulnerabilities that can be exploited during the integrations process. Integrations with legacy WMS must comply with regulations and current security standards and this may present special challenges.
Here is one final consideration. As technology continually advances, many legacy systems are no longer actively supported by their software vendors. Investing in the future of your business means using modern technology, rather than investing in technology that is at a dead end.
Conclusion:
Low code application platform-based warehouse management systems can be integrated readily and more cost-effectively to provide the seamless flow of data to disparate systems. Investing in integrations connects your operations to other solutions to enhance productivity, accuracy, visibility, and efficiency. Having a modern WMS in place can help ensure that your investment will be successful in providing the performance results and competitive advantage your company needs for the future.
Another Reason Why Datex Footprint WMS is Your ‘’YES” WMS
Footprint WMS has both robust task assignment and interleaving functionality. In addition, our software includes rule-based automation to assign work based on defined algorithms. Let us show you the difference using Footprint WMS can make to your bottom line.
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