What you shouldn’t (and should) do during your WMS implementation.

Before selecting a WMS you will have done all the due diligence expected; Reference site visits, checked out the suppliers accounts and probably checked reviews online. (Remember to do this properly, and I have had recent experience of people looking at the accounts one of our competitors and not recognising how fragile they are – the expectation is they will be sold again very soon and struggle to maintain basic levels of support but the prospect didn’t notice).

As part of a ‘decent’ WMS implementation you would have done all of the things expected of that; Full/ Provisional Functional Design Specification, three levels of testing, super user and standard user training, setup your sandbox, Mock go live and full go live support.

However…. Even with the best will in the world and the best system in the world some things can still be challenging, so how do you mitigate against that.

1: Work with the WMS provider.

The Functional Design element (if done by a decent provider of software like Snapfulfil for example) will be thorough and cover as many scenarios and processes as possible, however if you are not fully engaged in this part you should not expect any of the rest of it to work easily either. It’s critical that both you, your operational and day-to-day staff as well as technical resource work with the WMS provider as much as possible!! I have seen businesses buy a WMS and then expect the system to just magically appear. That would be true for a cheap out of the box system with very few benefits, but a complete and authoritative system needs the WMS supplier to understand your requirements as well as you do, and the only people who can express that are you!

This will require you and your business offering time and resource to the implementation.

2: Make sure the WMS provider has access to any third-party vendors you need it to interact with.

The biggest single-issue during implementation is always integration and it’s rarely a problem on the side of the WMS vendor. Sometimes the problem is a third-party vendor also provided a basic stock function (Typically an ERP/ OMS) and deliberately makes access to it painful for its own purpose. There is also the fact that a lot of the time the third-party does not see a benefit for it and considers it work for little gain (*some realise how short-sighted a view that is for retention of happy customers). It’s important you introduce your WMS contact to the third-party contact at an early stage and at the right level, you should also set terms of expectation with the third-party vendor.

3: Make sure you have your users buy-in and that they are fully trained.

Many people have a brilliant WMS put in and implementation goes seamlessly, yet inside the business it’s considered a failure. This happens because individuals in a business can actually influence the reputation of an implementation more than you could ever imagine.

While doing ERP implementations it became obvious that they were far more successful if people believed in it and they were part of it. Some successful implementations worked because operational basic staff were brought in to the process to help select vendor. Something else that worked very well as well was internal marketing; some people even go as far as having a countdown in posters up on their walls/ or perhaps a list of new functionality listed off daily up to golive.

Training is also critical, when people understand things their fear reduces meaning they are happier with it. Also they know what they are doing then!!! Good training is imperative and your provider should do face to face and online training not just one or the other.

4: Do not buy a system that requires heavy customisation!!!!

A good system should do virtually everything you need without programmatic customisation. Ours (Snapfulfil) requires virtually zero because of something so innovative I can go in-to much more detail if you message me. If you end up having programmatic customisation you lose out on upgrades and make further benefits harder to realise. Most of the biggest WMS vendors in the world keep teams and teams of people who need to be fed just by doing work after a sale. This ends up costing you a lot of money and we have deliberately worked to do another way without milking our customers.

Even though your processes may feel different, best practice and the fact the systems have probably already been adapted to do almost everything in the past mean that if the system requires heavy customisation I would red-flag that immediately!.

But the most important thing to do is..

Make sure all of the people in your business are committed to helping achieve a successful implementation and this is done and identified at an early stage.