Add Multimodal Mobile Devices to Your WMS with A Rapid ROI

Are you looking to add mobile devices and services to your proprietary, open source, or hosted warehouse management system, WMS? Mobilizing the warehouse or stockyard for voice picking, voice replenishment, voice shipping and receiving, RFID and other mobile operations can be added to proprietary or home-grown warehouse management systems for far less cost than you might imagine. In fact, costs associated with implementing mobile multimodal functionality in the warehouse and yard run less on average than adding the same functionality to packaged WMS solutions. The investment for mobilizing the WMS is typically returned within a year.

According to Logistics Management magazine, over 90 percent of warehouses and DCs still manually pick their orders using carts and pallet jacks. The typical warehouse uses some form of warehouse management system. Forty-four percent of all warehouses in the US employ high cost packaged warehouse management systems such as Red Prairie, Manhattan Associates, HighJump or SAP. Thirty six percent, however, use proprietary WMS solutions to control costs and long-term maintenance of the systems running warehouse operations.

Adding speech functionality, RFID or any of the numerous multimodal functions available on today’s mobile devices designed for inventory control, delivers dramatic increases in productivity, increases in order accuracy, and increases in safety within the warehouse and DC. Productivity increases, for example, by adding voice-picking functionality are typically 30-40%. Accuracy increases in order picking to 99.9% are the norm. Operators working with their hands and eyes free pay closer attention to their work which eliminates errors and ensures a safe working environment.

One industry myth is that higher costs are associated with integrating speech-recognition and multimodal mobile solutions to proprietary inventory control systems. The fact is that adding mobile services including speech to proprietary, hosted or open source WMS implementations can actually cost less than adding the same services to packaged systems. One reason for the lower cost to adding mobility and voice to proprietary warehouse management systems is that proprietary, in-house systems typically allow the mobile middleware to access the SQL or Oracle back-end database directly rather than conforming to a complex application programming interface, API, which is highly guarded by the packaged WMS vendors.

Regardless of your WMS, implementing a mobile solution that leverages your current mobile investment, and allows multiple tasks to be performed using the same mobile device yields a rapid ROI that is usually measured in just months.