Mobility the answer for warehouses under siege

Warehouses face many logistics pressures with increased competition and expected increases in efficiency. With the number of successful case studies increasing daily, warehouses are under pressure to deliver the goods. But how can they achieve their goals with so many solutions and vendors to choose from, many of them niche and unsuited to their industry in a fragmented logistics mobile solutions market? Mark Lilje, MD of RangeGate, explains the correct process.

Many companies find it hard to best exploit wireless and mobile technologies in the warehouse because, with little experience, they do not find the right partner that incorporates the right methodologies and best practices, which they need to derive maximum benefit from ERP and back-end systems.

Implementing a wireless and mobile solution requires a host of decisions to be made upfront, typically when the customer has the least experience to both decide on technology and find a service partner.

What warehouse operators should be looking for is a vendor that provides the right solution components in a project packaged for success, that typically includes services, devices, software and support.

In addition, putting this together requires that the vendor or service provider approach the implementation in the correct manner, and any successful implementation will have at least the following six stages:

* Pre-sales consulting;
* Functionality specification;
* Project planning;
* Development;
* User testing and functionality signoff; and
* Implementation and project signoff.

The benefits in adopting the right solution are clear. According to researcher Forrester, mobile applications tripled quality levels at Sun Microsystems and cut telecom costs by 90% at India Cements. As packaged applications lack mobile support, firms need mobile enterprise middleware to achieve these gains. Much of the mobile development work lies in this area, tying front-end mobile and wireless devices into back-end and operational systems.

Users are also beginning to see the effects of the economic downturn, that has highlighted brittle logistics processes, the net result of which Forrester believes will be wireless devices linking production planning to inbound parts over the next two years.

That said, the mobile enterprise applications market is stalled - but there is hope. Just 2.2% of firms with mobile enterprise applications have made them mobile. What application vendors need is a solutions-oriented approach to trigger demand, and clients can begin to derive the benefit from the costly and lengthy implementation of ERP solutions.

Forrester believes this is happening, as it indicates that Europe`s online logistics will grow to a lb133 billion industry by 2005 and 21% of all logistics transactions will be online by 2005.

In order to realise the benefits of mobile and wireless optimisation technologies, warehouse operators need to find a solution partner, not product and technology providers.

Pre-sales consulting is a critical element in the process of delivering a solution that suits the client`s needs. Vendors must know the customer`s business so they can advise them on best practices. That is because mobile and wireless solutions simply mobilise existing processes, and if these are incorrect, a bad situation is simply aggravated.

Once that step is completed, customers face a wide range of hardware and software technology choices. It is important for return on investment and total cost of ownership that users buy the right device upfront, taking into account future demand while allowing enough flexibility to adapt to changing business processes and needs. Total cost of ownership is again highlighted because devices will and do fail at some stage, no matter the quality.

Replacement, servicing and maintenance must be taken into account upfront and service agreements need to be tailored to suit the customer needs.

Interoperability is another cause for concern, and devices must seamlessly integrate into backend systems. Standardised software also gives the user flexibility in that they are not bound to a specific device. Vendors must also ensure that software is user-friendly because in 90% of failed implementations, the cause is poor user acceptance. Primarily though, users want to steer clear of proprietary software, applications and hardware, because as is the nature with IT equipment, it will be replaced or at least upgraded within five years.

Support becomes more of an issue the more mission-critical the application is. Equipment suppliers must be in a position to repair faulty equipment and be onsite if necessary to solve issues that may arise, with a guaranteed response and resolution time.

In terms of arriving at these goals, users need to ensure that the service and solution provider takes no shortcuts, and users must not insist on them due to tight deployment schedules. More shortcuts lead to a higher probability of failure, from the presales process through to the implementation and signoff. Presales is one of the most critical stages of a mobile and wireless implementation project because vendors create perceptions and expectations in the customer`s mind, so they must be real expectations, before the functional specification stage is arrived at.

This stage sees vendor experts beginning to properly understand the customer`s business processes and it is based on this stage that the use of mobile and wireless within the organisation is proposed. It also feeds the developers the information they need in order to build or customise a system for the environment.

Development leads to configuring against the functional specification and in some cases live testing should be performed to ensure optimum integration and interoperability with existing systems. It also leads to beneficial user feedback for further refinement of the solution.

After implementation and signoff, bug fixing begins and all the gremlins should be ironed out of the system. This is also the stage where users should be able to redefine scope and implement a new project for further development of the system.

Following these steps should see warehouse operators finding problems a remote occurrence. The bottom line is that development will occur once following solid definition of processes within the business.

The only other issue that may arise is lack of ownership, which typically manifests itself as a boardroom decision to deploy a mobile and wireless decision, but sees little support from the users at ground level. It also manifests itself as poor resources assigned by the business to test the system, which results in many bugs remaining resident after going live.