Completed WMS projects

International logistics company 3PL

Evaluating the presently used Warehouse Management System

Branch

  • Logistic service provider industry

The international logistics company 3PL are a leading international provider of integrated Logistics Solutions. They support Industry and Businesses with Land, Air and Ocean Freight services.

The 3PL company approached the Fraunhoffe Warehouse Logistics Team with the task of evaluating their current Warehouse Management Systems.

Aims and Objectives
The 3PL company uses many different Warehouse Management Systems (WMS) in their worldwide distribution centres (DC). This includes everything from simple card box systems to spreadsheets to the state-of-the-art WMS. The acquisition of other 3PL companies continuously added to the number and forms of WMS used by the company. As well as that, there was no standardized process for deciding on a WMS for a new DC, which resulted in an even greater variety of systems.

The aim was to catalogue the current WMS and to make them comparable. A second aim was to identify ten potential WMS that would be given preference when selecting a WMS for future use.

Initial Situation
The 3PL company decided against the complete cataloguing of the WMS in use for reasons of time and costs. Based on typical application areas and business model and as well as strategic decision criteria seven of the WMS already used by the 3PL company were identified as suitable WMS for future projects. Three further WMS were to be identified by the Team warehouse logistics.

International Market Study WMS
The three additional WMS suppliers were identified with the help of the International Market Study Warehouse Management Systems. This study is carried out by the Fraunhofer IML and offers a comprehensive overview of the WMS market. It includes the performance profiles of more than 70 WMS suppliers and covers over 2,500 individual aspects.

In cooperation with staff from the 3PL company the questionnaire used by the market study was extended to include the specific requirements of the company. Additional attention was paid to aspects such as “value added logistics” and “internationality of the suppliers”.

The evaluation of the data resulted in the identification of three more WMS-suppliers. The project-specific questionnaire was then filled in by the ten WMS-suppliers.

Validation
An important task of Team warehouse logistics is to ensure that the collected data is reliable. Therefore the answers given by the individual WMS suppliers were validated during one day workshops. Individual processes were run through, functions presented, forms printed and database models were discussed. Any deviations from the answers given in the questionnaire were corrected. The same criteria and standards were applied to each supplier – making the various systems easily comparable.

Results
At the end of the evaluation process the 3PL company had

  • a list of ten WMS-suppliers that will receive preference when selecting new WMS and
  • a high quality data base describing the scope of performance of the ten WMS and that forms the basis for a future decision matrix for the internal WMS selection.

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