Easy? Just get it installed, give your people a bit of training a few days before and it will all go smoothly yes? No. No again. Swapping out your WMS is a major change as it is one of, if not the most important software systems to your business. Planning the change and monitoring progress during the implementation are key. While occasionally WMS implementations fail due to “poor software”, most fail due to the human elements around planning and execution. This brings me to the first part of the WMS Change Management Process:
The People
Your Team:
Start by identifying the key staff you will need to help select and implement the software. I can’t emphasize how important it is to ensure you have a wide range of team members. Stacking the selection and implementation team with IT and Finance isn’t going to be a winner. Why? Those teams are not the ones that are going to be using the system day in and day out. I am not saying not include them, but ensure you have good representation from Operations. Make sure you have a mix of roles from the Operations team.
Training:
Don’t just give each department 4 hours of training the day before going live. Start your training months in advance. Use real life scenarios, don’t sit your warehouse operators in front of a desktop computer. Get them on the equipment they will be using and run real life scenarios. Do this in meaningful but manageable time slices, like 1 hour. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat again. Repetition is your friend when it comes to retention.
Your Customers (Internal and External):
The WMS change is going to affect your customers. You really hope it is going to a positive change. You can take steps to make sure it is. Engage with your customer well before you have implemented the software. I am not suggesting that you get them involved in the selection process, but after a decision has been made is a good time to socialize the upcoming change with your customer. Prior to go live, give them a demonstration to show the forms, reports, alerts and other customer facing outputs they will be getting. Customers don’t like surprises, so don’t spring a new WMS on them on go live day!
Other Stakeholders:
This is between my team and my customer, only right? No. This change impacts many more stakeholders, like perhaps your customer’s primary carrier. Let them know what is going on once you get close to go live. They can help you be successful. One example is, if you are going live on the next Monday, things are probably going to go at a slower pace for a couple of days while everyone gets used to the new system. The carrier could probably help you by supplying extra empty trailers the week prior so that you can pre-load some of the next week’s orders.
The Systems
While you are changing only the WMS, there is most likely going to be an impact to other systems, both yours and your customers. Quite likely you have these system integrations:
- Internal integrations to ERP, TMS etc.
- External integrations to customer systems. Either through EDI or API
As with the people, planning the change regarding your other systems is critical. As an example, with your internal integrations, you may want to enhance or increase the frequency, types and amounts of data you want to exchange with the new WMS. There are some real benefits to looking at this and improving the information exchange. One example is, perhaps your customer service people who use the ERP have no visibility into order status in the warehouse and have to call down to the warehouse to enquire about an order? This wastes time and costs you labor. Why not have the new WMS order status to the ERP as the order flows through the warehouse? Once you have spec’d your integrations, insure they are developed by your team or your vendor in a timely manner. You don’t want to be testing the integrations a day before go-live. Test early, test often.
External systems can be challenging. They are your customer’s or your customer’s customers. But they are critical, and integrations must be configured and tested prior to go live. Nothing is going to is going to anger internal or external customers more than the order interfaces failing as one example. Having said that, typically you can’t just call up you customer and say, “right can we test some integrations tomorrow?” As mentioned earlier, engage your customers early. Plan for multiple rounds of integration testing, well before your go live date.
Monitoring Progress
Ensure you set weekly meetings and I suggest daily meetings 3 weeks or so before go live. If you have selected a quality vendor such as Infolog, you will have a project plan to follow to track your progress. Hold your team and your vendor to target dates. Missing the date on one item can have a trickle down effect on others. As an example, if your integrations aren’t ready to go and you need to print data from your customer’s order file on your BOL, you won’t be able to test your document.
Encourage constructive criticism. This is a complex project. Stuff is going to happen. Nothing would worry me more that every week my team reporting everything is fine, there are no issues. You want the truth.
Thanks for reading. Careful planning, monitoring and execution of the implementation can ensure a smooth transition. Contact us today for more information on our Operations-centric WMS that is highly scalable and can deploy quickly!