Bridget McCrea, an editor at Supply Chain Management Review, recently wrote an article about the importance of a well-coordinated and configured Warehouse Management System (WMS) at the center of your warehouse. She reached out to top industry experts, including St. Onge Company’s Howard Turner, for the opinions. Howard discussed how the future of WMS software may be in the cloud as a Software as a Service model.
“Everyone is pushing to the Cloud,” says Turner, who is also hearing from many shippers that they want to better understand the value of this shift before they make this move. One reason is because acquiring software “as a service” is an operational expense (OpEx) versus a capital expense (CapEx). Put simply, a larger upfront investment is effectively replaced with a monthly subscription fee. Turner says companies with longer-term software strategies are rethinking whether they want to “buy” or “rent.”
“Some companies still want to better understand the value of moving to a subscription service, and the industry as a whole can be doing a better job of explaining that value,” Turner points out. “The IT team gets it, and understands that it doesn’t require the hardware, servers or people that it would need to be able to manage on-premises systems.”
Other key value points that Turner says Cloud providers could be playing up include the fact that the company is always on the latest version of the software and it can avoid going through the upgrade process.
Click here to read the full article on the Supply Chain Management Review site!
