Softeon WMS and WES Directly Control Picking Sub-Systems, Reducing Costs, Improving Throughput, and Increasing Agility
Softeon, a global supply chain software provider with the industry’s best track record of customer success, continues to add to its innovative approach to various types of materials handling and order picking solutions, delivering agility, performance and ROI for its Warehouse Management System (WMS) and Warehouse Execution System (WES) customers.
The level of “eaches” picking in many distribution operations has grown significantly as a result of e-commerce and other factors. This is driving change to order profiles and increasing picking costs for retailers, consumer goods companies going direct-to-consumer (DTC), as well as many wholesalers.
In this new era, companies must develop improvements in two inter-related areas: fulfillment capabilities and fulfillment capacity. Of course, capabilities have a major impact on capacity. Many companies found it difficult to keep up with the surge in e-commerce in the 2020 holiday season and are now looking to bolster capabilities and capacity in 2021.
Many companies are turning to a variety of technologies to reduce those picking costs and increase throughput, including Voice, smart pick carts, put walls, pick-to-light, and mobile robots, to improve order picking productivity and capacity.
However, in most scenarios, those sub-systems include their own control software. This approach has a number of disadvantages, such as: making commodity hardware systems proprietary and expensive; requiring integration upfront and over time between those control systems and the WMS; and providing limited ability to fully optimize the complete picking process, including slotting, replenishment, real-time decision-making and exception handling, with the different sub-systems operating in silos.
The Softeon WMS/WES eliminates all of these problems by directly managing all of the sub-systems in any combination. This eliminates the need for third-party control software and interfaces. Most importantly, it results in improved flexibility by having only one system – the Softeon WMS/WES – optimizing the entire picking, replenishment and slotting processes, delivering levels of productivity that simply cannot be achieved by a WMS “throwing picks over the wall” for execution by these sub-systems operating in silos, as it is commonly done.
It also makes it very easy to add these kinds of MHE capabilities over time and to do pilots and simulation testing to gauge potential benefits.
Softeon’s innovative approach extends to the use of mobile robots, offering a single platform to manage and optimize robotic system performance across multiple hardware providers, which is unique in the industry.
“Softeon’s approach to material handling and picking sub-systems is unique in the WMS market, with many advantages above how most other vendors do it,” said Dan Gilmore, chief marketing officer at Softeon, adding “Softeon continues to lead the way in integrating and optimizing materials handling systems in distribution, with the effort to easily plot, deploy and scale.”
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