Voice and WMS Special technology report
the network should become interrupted, businesses are tending to keep control of their own solutions.”
created a market of businesses that need to ship products quickly, accurately and in large volumes, yet haven’t had time to gradually develop their operational processes to support their bulging volumes. “This rapid success creates its own problems, which often requires a sophisticated software solution,” said Clark, “but delivered without the enormous initial investment in time and money traditionally required. This difficult question is answered by SaaS solutions in both the WMS and Voice markets. Some SaaS WMS vendors even include Voice in their overall package, bringing the best of both worlds together for their clients.”
Clark added that many traditional WMS vendors and analysts suggest that SaaS WMS solutions cannot support high numbers of transactions quickly enough. However, he maintains this is not the case. “Our largest e-commerce client was shipping up to 50,000 orders per day during their peak Christmas period, from a 30,000 sq ft warehouse, with 30 pickers,” he pointed out. “Each order required upload and
Sudip Masoji, business development manager
www.logisticsit.com
confirmation of payment interfaces, so the WMS was handling over 100,000 transactions per day and fast enough to support the picking operation at full speed. This client helps to comprehensively prove that a properly developed, SaaS WMS, that makes use of the latest technologies (and isn’t a cut down on-premise solution sold in a different way) is more than capable of handling a busy warehouse operation.”
Vennemann believes SaaS is an important trend. “The advantage for the user is that the costs are spread in time and are more in line with the expected improvements because of the WMS,” he said. However, Vennemann added that Vanderlande focuses on delivering complete logistics solutions, consisting of material handling systems fully integrated with its Vision Warehouse Management and Control System. “This makes the SaaS concept less applicable,” he said. Stanhope has seen little or no impact of SaaS in the WMS or Voice market as yet, although he expects this to change in the medium- to long-term. “Operationally critical systems such as these need to be ultra-resilient,” he said. “With very few reliable disaster recovery options being available via a SaaS solution if
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Binder considers that the challenge with implementing a SaaS system is that it requires complete standardisation. “The difficulty here is that no two warehouses or their processes are identical, and a level of customisation is always necessary,” he said. “The first step to enabling this is for the most widely used WMS solutions to be available as Cloud-based applications and be standardised for SaaS. Then it will be relatively straightforward for companies like Zetes to follow with a Cloud- based Voice execution system. In the shorter term, Zetes will be adding Cloud-based dashboard solutions that can enhance existing installations.” Finken makes the point that topVOX cooperates with system integrators in the UK to offer SaaS as a service. However, he adds that, currently, neither Cloud computing nor SaaS plays a significant role for topVOX customers in the strictest sense. Nevertheless, topVOX’s Voice solution, topSpeech-Lydia, already technically supports this new approach, and allows the use of centrally held data by the customer's widely scattered locations.
Integration
…fast communication is the basis for reliable, error-free performance in processes like goods movement.”
– Sudip Masoji, DLoG.
Have ways of best integrating Voice-directed systems with other systems – such as WMS and ERP – developed to any notable degree over the past year or two? Gerrard considers that integration of Voice into the WMS or order fulfilment system has always been a particularly crucial and sometimes difficult aspect of Voice solution deployment, which has
the potential to impact project costs. “In just the past couple of years, configuration tools such as Voxware’s VoxConnect have emerged that make WMS-Voice interfacing far more straightforward,” he said. “The existence of these tools, and the increasing embrace of their open technology foundations by the major WMS companies, has reduced the complexity and cost of many Voice implementations.”
July 2011
MANUFACTURING &LOGISTICS
IT 17
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