Fit Over Features: What Your Warehouse Management System Should Actually Do

A Good WMS Should Mold to Your Process.

By Dolphin Data Capture & BullsEye Computing

Today’s warehouse runs on technologies that each made sense the day they were installed but were never designed to work together. Some operations still run on a mix of paper and spreadsheets. Others are running multiple enterprise resource planning (ERP) alongside other SaaS tools.

The result is the same: data scattered across places that don’t talk to each other.

That gap is where Dolphin Data Capture and BullsEye Computing work together. BullsEye is the company behind Mosaic, a mobile-first warehouse and inventory management system (WMS). Dolphin brings the Automatic Identification and Data Capture (AIDC) hardware, the barcode scanners, RFID readers, and printers. These are the data capture technologies that bring warehouse operations to life, alongside the engineering and consulting judgment to figure out what a given operation actually needs. Dolphin’s team includes engineers and integrators whose focus is on what each warehouse customer is trying to accomplish.

“No two warehouses operate the same way, and neither should their automation strategy,” says Kathleen Crowley, Customer Experience Executive at Dolphin. Not every operation needs the most advanced technology on day one. The work is to understand the workflows, the constraints, and where the business wants to be in a few years, then recommend for where it is today.

A tale of two warehouse customers.

John Walden, Director of Sales at BullsEye, sorts the work into two ideal customer profiles. Of course there are other types of customers, but many engagements start like one of the two.

First up is the first-time automator, often a smaller company that has hit a threshold where it has to take software seriously. Frequently there is a homegrown system in the picture. Someone’s nephew built something years ago, it held up for five years, and then it didn’t.

Next up is the experienced enterprise team that has an ERP but can’t get its warehouse module to fit the way its operation actually runs, and needs help building something that does.

The common ground between the two customer types is an inability to apply their current tools to their growing WMS requirements.

Profile one: the visibility problem

For the first-time automator, the problem is visibility, and it shows up in a few simple ways. People don’t know where things are. Inventory lives on slips of paper that get moved, misfiled, or lost, and two people each assume the other has it handled. Even a well-run paper operation carries a delay built into it. Something arrives at two in the afternoon, and nobody knows it is in the building until someone walks to a computer at the end of the day and keys it in.

For this customer, the questions are basic. Where are my inventory assets? How fast are they turning? What is the trend? A manual system is really just a way of capturing data into one place, which is what logistics software is trying to do in the first place, only in a form the business can actually process.

That same gap can often drive a second problem: reordering. Plenty of manufacturers working with small parts simply throw them in a bin and have no reliable sense of when they are running low. In industries with six-week or three-month lead times, finding out late means being late.

Sometimes the lack of WMS is really a personnel issue in disguise.

“When you’re growing and you’re small enough, you’re willing to take the risk of having a few employees who hold a great deal of institutional knowledge, because you don’t really have a choice. And then you grow large enough that if you lose someone from that team, it’s a big deal,” notes Jeremy Hess, CEO at BullsEye.

Profile two: the flexibility problem

For the enterprise team, the problem is a lack of system flexibility. Inventory modules that ship with large ERP systems tend to be robust and feature-rich. The trouble is that they expect the customer to conform to the vendor’s workflow rather than the other way around, and they are hard to bend. Teams that have spent years fighting that inflexibility eventually reach a point where they decide the system simply does not line up with what they do in the warehouse, and it is time to change.

Set aside production itself, the actual manufacturing of goods, and warehouse work is more alike than different from one company to the next. Receiving, tracking, movement, outbound: the process is broadly similar regardless of the product. What is not similar is the operational detail, and that is exactly where a rigid vendor module can feel too restrictive.

Making a WMS fit an enterprise also means connecting it to everything around it. Working alongside BullsEye, Dolphin helps integrate the warehouse with ERP, manufacturing execution, and quality management systems, so a receipt can be validated against a real source of truth instead of trusted on faith.

Layered on top are industry specifics, says Hess: lot numbers and expiration dates for food, beverage, and other regulated goods, and serial-level tracking where individual high-value assets have to be told apart even when they look identical.

Fit over features

All of which leads to the point both teams keep returning to. As Walden puts it: “A good WMS sees your process and molds to it, rather than the other way around.”

That sounds like a line until you watch what happens without it. Large off-the-shelf WMS and ERP modules are essentially the same for every customer. If you have a ten-step process and the vendor insists step four be done a certain way, you cannot change it, so warehouse workers end up changing their process instead. Walden describes operations where two workstations sit side by side, but because the software demands a particular order, a worker walks to a third station and back to satisfy the system rather than the work. The flexibility to reflect what is actually happening on the floor is missing.

Usability is the same problem. A system designed by IT, without the floor in the loop, tends to be impractical to actually use, and when it reaches the people doing the work, they refuse it. In a warehouse, a digital step has to be faster than the handwritten pick sheet it replaces, or it will not survive contact with a real shift.

Part of what makes fit possible is who you are actually dealing with. Large ERPs carry fifteen or twenty years of accumulated tech debt, and changing them often means routing a request through a managed services provider and a ticket queue and waiting months for it to come back. With BullsEye, those layers collapse. The person hearing the request is the person changing the deployment, and a customer can test the change the next day.

How it actually gets in the door

None of this is sold on a presentation, says Anthony Pennino, Customer Experience Executive at Dolphin. Both teams work through a pilot, usually a month or two, run as an isolated proof of concept rather than a full integration, just to get the workflows right. BullsEye provides the software. Dolphin provides the scanners, the rest of the hardware, and the training to make the proof of concept succeed. Then everyone meets weekly to ask a simple question: how did that go? Dolphin’s team sets expectations up front, trains, and tests before anyone goes live, and keeps the whole thing consultative from the start. You can talk someone’s ear off about why a system is better, but if they cannot feel it working in their own warehouse, it falls flat.

Hardware choice follows the same logic. It starts with what you are trying to accomplish, then comes recommendations for barcode, RFID, machine vision, or a combination of scanning technologies.

One team, before you called A coherent data capture environment isn’t something you purchase off the shelf. It’s assembled by experienced consultants who were already talking to each other before you called. About Dolphin Data Capture. An engineering-led integration partner that helps OEMs and enterprise operations teams design and deploy barcode, RFID, machine vision, and mobile computing solutions built to hold up in rugged, real-world environments. (www.dolphindc.com) About BullsEye Computing. The company behind Mosaic, a mobile-first warehouse and inventory management system designed to fit each customer’s actual process, from first-time automators to enterprise teams whose ERP module will not bend to the way they work. (www.bullseye-computing.com)

Working with Dolphin Data Capture.

Ready to start a WMS pilot for your warehouse? Contact the Dolphin team at 516-405-3990 or info@dolphindc.com and have your questions ready!