Perfect harmony: Improving real-time data collection in your warehouse management system
Combining voice, RF, RFID, and other hardware systems to improve real-time data collection is enhancing WMS performance—and can lead to dramatic gains in overall supply chain operations.
By Bridget McCrea, Contributing Editor -- Logistics Management, 1/1/2008
Everyone knows there’s no such thing as a standalone solution in today’s highly integrated business world, where logistics managers spend time connecting the dots between the many links of the supply chain. Warehouse Management System (WMS) vendors have caught onto the need for more robust technology systems to manage the supply chain, and they are including hardware like RF (Radio Frequency), voice, and RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) into their offerings.
According to ARC Advisory Group of Boston, voice recognition reigns as a top choice for WMS vendors looking to take their products to the next level. A WMS originally constructed around RF scanning, for example, may be more effective at enabling users to assemble mixed-SKU cases of goods via an integrated speech recognition system. And while not fully mature yet, RFID may also play a role in providing real-time warehouse data to the WMS. Where the application can provide value, for example, is in doing fast scans of a warehouse’s contents to figure out exactly what items are there, and where they are located within the four walls.
ARC also sees the emergence of multi-modal hardware applications (where RF scanning and voice, for example, are used in combination) as an evolving trend. “By combining voice, RF, and RFID in new ways, warehouse tasks can become quicker to perform, resulting in better data reliability,” says Steve Banker, ARC’s service director for supply chain management.
Voices rising
Advances on the hardware side have implications for how a WMS solution should be constructed. Despite the attention that RFID has had, Banker says more voice enablement modules were sold than RFID last year and, adds Banker, a new generation of voice is emerging that is more flexible and has a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). In the voice area, he points to two WMS suppliers as having interesting strategies: Cadre Technologies and Red Prairie.
Cadre has its own voice solution and doesn’t rely on a third party, and as such can offer a low-cost system. “They’re selling a number of solutions to small 3PLs,” says Banker, who points out that the voice user’s typical profile had previously been much larger companies, and the traditional rule of thumb was that there needed to be at least 50 users who would use voice terminals before the ROI value proposition made sense.
Another provider that is putting effort into understanding the need for the integration of WMS and hardware is RedPrairie, whose product doesn’t require customers to pay additional fees for an RFID or voice module. Expect to see other WMS vendors jumping into the fray by offering speech recognition and/or RFID as add-on modules, says Banker.
Known simply as “voice,” speech recognition is playing a key role in today’s WMS, according to John Fontanella, senior vice president and research director of Supply Chain Services for AMR Research in Boston. He sees a “fairly rapid adoption of voice,” particularly in the grocery industry, but also in other sectors. When it comes to integrating those technologies with a WMS, Fontanella says the process is fairly straightforward, provided the shipper isn’t using an old legacy system, or one that’s been heavily customized. “The large WMS vendors have built software platforms to support voice and ease of integration,” says Fontanella.
At RedPrairie, Gary Morgan, vice president of technology services, says demand for voice has been on the rise for the last three years. When integrated with a WMS, Morgan says voice allows shippers to take a more granular approach to picking, packing, and shipping, allowing those in the direct-to-consumer market to mix SKUs in their shipments, for example. “Voice allows them to pick at a more detailed level and rapid pace, and it improves both the velocity and quality of the picks, as well as the order fulfillment percentage,” says Morgan.
The fact that speech recognition itself has come a long way in the last few years also makes it attractive for shippers, according to Banker. He adds that Individual users no longer have to spend 20 or 30 minutes programming their voices and the commands into the system, hoping that it would recognize their voices when the time came to use it.
“New speech systems are speaker-independent,” says Banker. “That means less training and re-training time and more flexibility in using the solutions in a variety of applications.”
Multi-modal chorus
From his vantage point as senior analyst for warehousing and transportation at The Aberdeen Group, Ian Hobkirk says he’s seeing more WMS vendors looking at multi-modal automatic data capture as a way to combine functions like bar code scanning and voice into a single hardware application. “More voice providers are making their technology available on multi-function, off-the-shelf devices made by companies like Intermec or Motorola,” says Hobkirk. “This has brought down the cost, and also made the operation much more flexible.”
And while Hobkirk doesn’t ever see RFID replacing barcode scanning in WMS, he says there are certain cases where it would make sense to do so. A warehouse worker who is walking around the facility with a handheld computer, for example, would benefit from the ability to identify specific items via RFID. “Where I feel RFID has the best value in the warehouse is when you have a bunch of items, and you need to figure out if they’re really 'here,’ and how they’re packaged,” says Hobkirk. “For the most part, however, you’re identifying one item at a time and that’s easier—and much cheaper—to do with a bar code scanner.”
The good news is that hardware costs have come down significantly over the last few years, says Hobkirk, making the integration process with a WMS that much more viable. A standard, off-the-shelf handheld scanner with character base costs about $2,000, for example, making the upfront cost of a WMS that much more affordable for shippers of all sizes. The advent of on-demand WMS has also put such products within reach for budget-minded shippers, Hobkirk adds.
With only about 9 percent of companies using voice right now, Hobkirk sees the integration of that hardware with WMS gaining traction over the next year. “It’s becoming much more mainstream,” he says. “And while I don’t see RFID taking the same route, our research shows that companies in a variety of different operations are turning to voice as a way to streamline with warehouse operations.”
Banker sees more WMS vendors honing their products to integrate with hardware, and points to companies like Aldata Solutions and Cadre as examples of providers that have gotten ahead of the curve by offering WMS and speech products that are inherent in their systems (as opposed to “bolting on” another vendor’s hardware to an existing product), and delivered via a PDA or computer.
“These vendors have found their own engine and rules, and seamlessly linked them to their WMSs,” says Banker, who sees other software providers following in their footsteps over the next few years. “Leading vendors are aware of some of these concepts, although I think the actual product development is three to four years out for the majority of the market.”
Shippers are already reaping the benefits as evidenced in the case study of how Corporate Express Canada made dramatic gains in the picking productivity at its warehouses after implementing a voice-directed order picking solution that combines voice, barcode scanning, and sophisticated software.
Morgan says there’s no question that the WMS space will include more hardware integration in the future. “I’m expecting voice to comprise 10 to 15 percent of all marketed RF technology next year,” says Morgan, who adds that the percentage translates into a significant impact for a vendor that delivers 5,000 to 10,000 units over a year’s time.
“We’re beginning to see some decent volume and represented demand from customers, which in turn requires that we have effective methods in place by which we can deploy this technology,” adds Morgan.
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