Industry Experts Speak

WMS by the Numbers

When it comes to warehouse management systems, the stats are both shocking and thought provoking. Here are the numbers you need to know.
By Rene Jones

Warehouses are built around numbers — from the facility's square footage, to how many rows of racking it takes to stock the number of stock-keeping units (SKUs), all the way to the amount of orders processed through a facility in a day. This article is designed to take the numbers associated with warehouse management systems you don't see in the marketing brochures or advertisements of WMS vendors and get you thinking before you purchase and begin to implement a warehouse management system (WMS). see full article »

ARC Article

The primary mission of a Warehouse Management System (WMS) is the management of a warehouse's resources, including space, labor, equipment, tasks, and material flows. By ARC's definition, a WMS is a real-time solution, not a paper-based one. For many years, to be real-time meant to use RF (Radio Frequency) terminals, but within the last few years, voice recognition has become a fully mature technology and is now generally included. While not fully mature, RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) technology may also be used to provide real-time data to the WMS.

One of the most interesting developments in the WMS market is that changes in Automatic IDentification (AutoID) hardware are leading to changes in warehouse processes. ARC is seeing the emergence of multimodal hardware applications — applications where RF scanning and voice, for example, are used in combination. RFID readers are also being integrated into forklifts, and new multi-modal applications involving RFID and voice are being explored. These advances on the hardware side have implications for WMS suppliers. WMS suppliers must build process flows that fit the new possibilities. More fundamentally, however, these multi-modal AutoID applications will affect the core architecture of a WMS solution. For more information, please visit us at www.arcweb.com/res/study.

The WMS market has grown faster than expected. Find out what is driving this growth and how suppliers can take advantage of it.

• How can WMS providers increase their value propositions by changing the architecture of their solutions?
• Which add-on modules to the core WMS have the greatest growth prospects?
• How can suppliers use an offshore model to boost their revenues?
• How critical is initial cost in relation to lifecycle cost?
• What regions, verticals, customer tiers, and types of solutions will experience the greatest growth?
• Where should WMS companies make their R&D investments?

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