Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Cloud vs. SaaS WMS: A Level Productivity Playing Field

by Dan Villanueva

What’s great about the Cloud-SaaS debate is that innovation provides greater opportunity for a level productivity playing field. The small to mid-size companies with a smaller mobile workforce can adopt evolving distribution technology, benefit from faster, more accurate distribution, without ‘breaking the bank’. The one constant continues to be change. WMS customer-demand is driving it. Innovation delivers it.

Chad Collins, VP of Marketing and Strategy for HighJump Software makes a great case for extending WMS capabilities through the cloud. Specifically, the distinctions between cloud, SaaS and Hosted services, and the criteria for successful adoption. His point is that its not just about lower costs, its also about the level of customization that even the small and medium size warehouse operations need. He’s right, ‘one-size’ seldom fits all, neither does one price. Any warehouse professional, advocating for any size warehouse operation will assess business requirements and risk with affordability, cost-justification and return on investment.

The attraction of a cloud based/subscription costing model for WMS applications has to be tugging at warehouse management professionals. The ability to walk away from hardware maintenance, upgrades, software costs would be freeing for these overworked folks; problem is that the applications are generic in nature; not focusing on core business differentiators that the staffs have taken years to perfect providing substantive process improvements, productivity gains and exploiting multi modal approaches to very complex WMS needs.

If you’re a proponent of the WMS SaaS model, you're likely to suggest that cost, customization and flexibility can be addressed by process models and business rules.

Regardless of which side of the SaaS vs.Cloud fence one might sit on, the reality is that after a two year economic down turn, all of a sudden HighJump and a handful of its competitors will fight over a WMS market CAGR of 8.2 percent (TechNavio), through 2014…a substantial portion of the anticipated market growth will from small and medium business sector.

A Level Playing Field for Voice Productivity
We assessed the same business dynamics, when developing our voice productivity solution for warehouse, field services and other mobile workforce solutions. We saw the limitations and substantial integration costs of existing server-based, server-dependent voice solutions, the costly integration, upgrades and maintenance placed voice productivity out-of-reach for many companies, large or small. Research underscored that only a fraction of the total WMS market could afford the expensive voice pioneering technologies, for voice picking, receiving and inventory management, nor would they risk the change to their business processes to adopt it.

So we built a voice productivity solution completely and seamlessly delivered from the mobile computer… circumventing the server as the point of application voice integration. Integration with the WMS or other SCM application is achieved completely on and from, the mobile device, allowing customized voice functionality to support the specific needs of the customer. By design, we eliminated the substantial acquisition and maintenance costs associated with server-based solutions, and provided maximum customization and enabling voice productivity for any size business.

Like cloud and SaaS customer options, innovation created a level playing field for voice productivity… for any size business operation, for any mobile SCM application, at a cost-justifiable price. Whether the customer’s WMS is on-premise, or delivered via cloud, SaaS, ASP or other hosted systems, the customer wins.

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