Warehouse Execution System Opportunity for Different Approach Using a Platform

 

Last week I worked for a day with exciting team of System Integrators who are in the MES space, one is old friend from South Africa who has moved to Australia. The attitude is great, “we will have a go”, so we discussed and visited a customer site around the possible opportunity for Warehouse Execution System, running in conjunction with Warehouse Management System (usually in the ERP system).

People look at me sideways when I talk Warehouse, but in the manufacturing environment distribution and therefore warehousing is key, and actually moving away from storage to real time re-alignment of distribution.  You may ask what does that mean? The more and more we align value assets (manufacturing/ production sites) from single  running identities (islands, Profit and loss centers) to aligned Value Assets, you will see inventory drop, cash increase, and this can only become a reality be changing the warehouse to production like facility vs just a storage system.

This requires an Execution System to work in conjunction with the Warehouse Management System to really enable real-time execution, optimization, and streamlining within the facility, and more and more across multiple facilities. I was encouraged to have a good discussion around this last week, and saw the opportunity to leverage the new technologies available to enable this WES to become a reality that is manageable.

 The traditional execution systems that come with Warehouse Systems are just not flexible and certainly have no concept of multiple warehouse alignment. In the past I have implemented MES but the challenge is integration with the automation world especially relative to locations, and then the different operational procedures different sites have and shifts have.

But today we seeing:

·         Need to real-time alignment with execution on the warehouse, including location health awareness.

·         Traceability within the warehouse

·         Optimization in storing and picking so that minimal times are required and maximum flexibility.

·         The desire for enforcement of operational practices across shifts and sites, needing standards management over sites.

·         The alignment of multiple warehouses and manufacturing / production facilities

So when applying today’s technologies and approaches:

·         The System Platform for real-time interaction, the ability to develop intelligent objects that represent equipment and locations so these can become exception based on health, as well providing a consistent set of transactional triggers for MES. Whilst also providing a distributed platform over multiple sites with these standards being managed over the sites.

·         MES providing the routing and inventory management and tracking and product definition rules

·         Workflow combined with the forms User interface to provide a Model Driven Operational Composite Framework. So task/ activity related User Interfaces with built in operational procedures can be developed and managed  across sites. This provides a sustainable / configurable environment for developing these unique operational procedures. A key capability is to monitor and analyze these procedures to continue to see where bottle necks are, and tune the procedures to increase human operational inter-action efficiency.

The key is the introduction of the platform as a sustainable real-time interaction and trigger system, and the Workflow composite framework to again provide a sustainable environment for procedure User Interface development.

Food for thought!!!!!

Last week I worked for a couple of days with an exciting team of System Integrators who are in the MES space, one is old friend from South Africa who has moved to Australia. The attitude is great, “we will have a go”, so we discussed and visited a customer site around the possible opportunity for Warehouse Execution System, running in conjunction with Warehouse Management System (usually in the ERP system).

People look at me sideways when I talk Warehouse, but in the manufacturing environment distribution and therefore warehousing is key, and actually moving away from storage to real time re-alignment of distribution.  You may ask what does that mean? The more and more we align value assets (manufacturing/ production sites) from single  running identities (islands, Profit and loss centers) to aligned Value Assets, you will see inventory drop, cash increase, and this can only become a reality be changing the warehouse to production like facility vs just a storage system.

This requires an Execution System to work in conjunction with the Warehouse Management System to really enable real-time execution, optimization, and streamlining within the facility, more and more across multiple facilities. I was encouraged to have a good discussion around this last week, with the opportunity to leverage the new technologies available to enable this WES to become a reality that is manageable.

The traditional execution systems that come with Warehouse Systems are just not flexible and certainly have no concept of multiple warehouse alignment.
In the past I have implemented MES but the challenge is integration with the automation world especially relative to locations, and then the different operational procedures different sites have and shifts have.