A New Approach to Warehouse Execution Software

Maybe your company has experienced the crash of a computer server that controls warehouse operations. It’s not fun, especially right before the busy year-end holidays.

At the height of seasonal sales, a large retailer offering furniture, kitchenware and home essentials lost a server, shutting down one of its distribution centers in the United States.

A warehouse manager phoned the company’s software vendor — a call with more than a little seasonal urgency behind it.

The manager expected to hear that the resolution would require hours to set up a new computer server, reinstall the warehouse control system and then redeploy the settings. Instead, the software vendor copied the application agents and configurations onto a second server and restored the distribution center’s system within five minutes.

The retailer’s warehouse execution system, built on the Agent Framework platform, has individual features that interface, control, monitor, optimize and report on activities in the distribution center. This discrete approach to functionality requires fewer IT resources and typically can be deployed and configured cost effectively. Importantly, the agent-based approach to software does not require changes to existing software code base that runs a company’s business applications, including enterprise resource planning (ERP) and warehouse management systems (WMS).