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With the strong interest in Warehouse Management Systems (WMS) in an era of ever growing complexities in order fulfillment, companies – especially for executives outside the supply chain – often ask what the differences are between a WMS and IMS - an Inventory Management System.

That may be because a company might already have an inventory system and wonders what additional capabilities they will get with a new WMS.

Warehouse Management Systems (WMS) continue to see high rates of adoption, driven by a number of factors, including the growth of ecommerce and efulfillment processes, wider adoption of robots and other forms of automation in the distribution center, and interest in moving to Cloud-based WMS solutions. Of course, WMS integration is a key aspect in the successful deployment of

The interest in software to manage warehouses and distribution centers remains strong, fueled by omnichannel fulfillment requirements, growing adoption of automation in the DC and other trends.

A quality Warehouse Management implementation is obviously key to a successful outcome. In fact, the effects of a poor implementation can often linger for many months.

WMS implementations are specifically challenging compared to other supply chain software implementations for several reasons.

Warehouse Management Systems, or WMS, is a very well-known category of supply chain software, first adopted more than 45 years ago, and now managing operations in thousands if not tens of thousands of distribution centers worldwide.

Still, we continue to find many companies, sometimes even large ones, that are new to WMS. Or, there are stakeholders in a new WMS project, for example from customer service, that lack WMS experience. In either case and often even for managers with some WMS experience, we’ve found it useful to review the core benefits a WMS delivers.

Supply chain management is all about tracking goods as they move through an intricate process. One of the key stops in that process is through vendor warehouses or distribution centers. You aren’t in control of the whole supply chain at every moment, so you need a means to keep a close eye on things moving through vendor nodes. That’s what vendor managed inventory (VMI) is all about.

Order fulfillment is the ultimate goal of supply chain management, and there are a lot of steps involved in meeting that goal. If you want to modernize your order fulfillment and develop a process that keeps up with brutal demands, you need distributed order management (DOM) software. It’s a key piece of supply chain and warehouse management, and it improves your fulfillment on two fronts.

As complex as manufacturing processes have become, the core of profitable manufacturing is actually very simple - you need as much output for as little cost as possible. It’s the easiest math in the world, right? Achieving those goals is another matter, and you will always be in search of ways to increase your throughput and throughput capacity. Sure, you need to find and remove bottlenecks in any component of the process, but everyone knows that’s a given. Solving bottleneck problems can require extremely specific methods.