A high-level conceptual framework to evaluate your warehouse consulting and WMS implementation needs should consider the stage and scope of your project, your priorities, and the landscape for WMS consultancies. These consultancies differ by scope of services, relationships with the WMS vendors, complementary capabiltieis, and resource availability and constraints. Through this framework you will quickly narrow down the list of capable consultancies that meet your requirements.
ARC Advisory Group’s research on the global WMS consulting market is almost complete. This research is focused on WMS specialists – those organizations that derive a substantial amount of their business from WMS-related consulting. Although the market is still fragmented, it’s not as much as I thought prior to conducting the research, and not nearly to the degree it was back in 2020. These WMS specialist consultants are very often responsible for the WMS implementations of contracts attributed to large, multinational IT consultancies […]
Cal Petty is the quitessential Atlanta-based, Georgia Tech educated WMS veteran. He provided me with an insightful, broad-based overview of the WMS consultancy ecosystem. So much so, that I asked him to provide his insights to Logistics Viewpoints readers. His insights include the ways in which experienced consultants are differentiated from the generallists, how roles and responsibilities at independent consultants have evolved over the years, and his advice to young professionals just beginning their career in the WMS space.
Systems Integrators (SIs) are a key part of the warehouse management system solution ecosystem. SIs have different business models, strengths, and weaknesses.
LLamasoft has developed a maturity model related to supply chain design solutions. As a leading supplier of supply chain design solutions, this is a natural extension for them. Developing a maturity model, however, is not for the faint of heart. The model explicity ties ROI from a design project to the maturity level.
A water purification company in Brazil can have the demand for their water treatment and sewage services increase as much as four times on a sunny day on a weekend. To more accurately forecast demand, they count the number of vehicles driving into the community. Demand analysis also relies on a forecast of weather conditions and historical tourism data. They are also prototyping IoT, Big Data, machine learning, and predictive analytics for process optimization.
When I speak with new customers, many of them tell me how in the past they viewed supply chain design as an optimization project that was completed every three to five years, often by third-party firms. Now these large, multi-national businesses are bringing supply chain design in-house and adopting it as a core business process. […]
