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. […]

When companies decide that their present warehousing operations are not what they should be, and that they need to either implement a warehouse management system (WMS) or outsource their warehousing operations to a 3PL, they need to work toward putting together a request for proposal (RFP). If that pre-work for putting together a RFP includes […]

Running Professional Services at Descartes for the last nine years, I’ve seen this old adage come up time and time again. It hasn’t mattered if the customer was implementing a TMS, Visibility, Route Planning or Mobile solution – I’ve seen “grand” projects crash or get endlessly mired and not produce the anticipated business results. The […]