When to migrate to newer WMS

Change is the constant thing in the world. At times our ROI is being held up by outdated technology and makes us less competitive. Customers and suppliers upgrade to new technology as they also face these challenges. Changing technology products comes with a cost. The benefits that will be realized by the change must be substantiated. So when to change your existing warehouse management application to a new WMS is an important question before every warehouse manager.

It all starts with technology out-date.  Newer technology keeps coming day by day. This may range from RF based picking to voice picking to RFID tags. As a result companies which adopt these technologies gain benefit from various quarters including operational efficiency. They tend to stay competitive in the market.

Technology out-dates lead to unrealistic total cost of ownership. This is mainly driven by increased cost of support and maintenance of the applications, reduced return on investments due to operational efficiency lag.Too many high priority issues appear in the application leading to higher downtime and less productivity.

Other parties like suppliers and customers also face these issues with technology out-date.  To stay competitive they also upgrade to newer technologies which requires standardization in operational procedures and system policies. Customers thus enforce the company to migrate to latest technology products which offers standardized operational procedures, resilient architecture and optimizes the productivity of the warehouse personnel.

Whether we like it or not, we are thus enforced to migrate to newer technology whenever the total cost of ownership exceeds and there is an upward trend in the support and maintenance costs.