Strengthening your supply chain one link at a time.
Warehouse Management Systems (WMS) are powerful tools that can transform warehouse operation; improving efficiency, reducing errors, and enabling better inventory control. However, when organizations consider adopting or upgrading a WMS, a critical question often arises:
Should we start by understanding our operational needs, or by learning what a WMS can offer? This isn’t just a philosophical question. It’s a practical decision point that can determine whether a WMS implementation meets expectations or becomes a costly mistake. Let’s examine both sides of the argument and explore how businesses can approach this strategically.
The Case for Understanding Operational Needs First
The intuitive approach for many organizations is to start by documenting current processes, identifying pain points or gaps, and defining operational needs. This approach assumes that technology should serve the business, not the other way around.
Grounding Technology in Business Reality
Every warehouse operation is unique. Factors like industry standards, SKU complexity, order volume, customer expectations, and labor availability create a highly specific operational environment. Understanding this context is essential. By clearly defining the operational problems you’re trying to solve, you can focus your technology search on solutions that address those issues.
For example, if you’re facing frequent inventory inaccuracies, you’ll want a WMS with strong cycle counting and real-time tracking features. If your main challenge is picking productivity; slotting logic, replenishment logic and capabilities, and pick path efficiency may be your most desirable features.
Avoid Overengineering or Underutilization
Organizations that jump into selecting a WMS without fully grasping their own needs risk either overengineering the solution (implementing costly features they’ll never use) or underutilizing the system (failing to utilize capabilities that could improve performance). By documenting workflows, identifying bottlenecks, and quantifying / identifying key metrics before exploring WMS options, companies can create a prioritized requirements list that becomes a powerful selection and configuration guide.
The Case for Understanding WMS Capabilities First
While knowing your business is essential, there’s also a compelling argument for first understanding what modern WMS applications can do, especially given the rapid evolution of warehouse technology.
You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know
If your team is only familiar with legacy processes or systems, your understanding of what’s “possible” may be limited. In this case, exploring WMS functionality early can broaden your vision and challenge your assumptions. For instance, many warehouse operators still rely on paper-based picking, unaware that voice picking, automated task allocation, and real-time dashboards are now standard in mid-tier WMS platforms. Learning what’s available can inspire process improvements that wouldn’t be considered otherwise.
Aligning with Best Practices
Many WMS platforms are designed around industry best practices. Familiarizing yourself with those built in workflows can guide your team toward standardization and simplification, reducing or eliminating the need for customizations and accelerating the implementation timeline. Rather than recreating every nuance of your current operation in the new system, understanding the WMS can prompt valuable questions like:
So, What Should Come First?
The truth is, neither approach works in isolation. The best outcomes come from an iterative and integrated process, where understanding your operational needs and exploring WMS capabilities evolve in tandem and adapt to create a new solution that best fits your operational needs.
A Strategic, Hybrid Approach
Baseline Operational Assessment
Start with a high-level assessment of your current operations. Identify key workflows (receiving, putaway, picking, replenishment, shipping, etc.), major pain points, and gaps force on operations due to current technologies. Document throughput volumes, error rates, space constraints, and other key performance indicators. This doesn’t have to be exhaustive, but enough to create a “baseline” of your warehouse’s current state.
Market Exploration and Education
Next, educate yourself on what modern WMS solutions offer. Attend demos, read product white papers, and speak with vendors or trusted consultants. Focus on understanding key modules, configurability, integration capabilities, and real-world use cases. This stage isn’t about selecting a vendor, it’s about expanding your awareness and identifying capabilities that could address your challenges or open new possibilities. The goal of this phase is to identify the vendors who will be a good partner, and who you will be interested in exploring an RFP process with.
Refine Requirements with Context
With a clearer picture of both your needs and what’s possible, return to your operational documentation and refine your requirements. Reassess workflows with your new knowledge of WMS capabilities:
This iteration turns high level goals into actionable requirements.
Select and Configure
Now you’re in a strong position to evaluate vendors and solutions based on real world priorities and feasibility. You can assess trade-offs, determine where configuration (not customization) is viable, and avoid surprises during implementation. With your understanding of both operational reality and system capability, your selection will be aligned to your individual needs and your implementation capability of supporting and expanding your operational abilities.
Avoiding Common Pitfalls
Regardless of which side you lean toward, beware of a few common traps:
Technology Led Implementations Without Operational Clarity
Rolling out a WMS just because it’s “feature rich” without aligning to real operational needs can lead to low adoption, confusion, and rework. This pitfall can be costly as new technologies often command a premium while offering little real world benefits to your operations if your needs did not align with the technologies capabilities.
Clinging to Legacy Processes
Refusing to adapt operations to WMS best practices often results in costly customizations that delay implementation and limit long-term flexibility. The goal of a new implementation is to utilize standardized software that is easy to maintain, while also improving operational capabilities. Operations must be open to adopting new processes, where practical, in order to maximize the benefit that a WMS can offer your business.
Failing to Engage Cross-Functional Teams
Warehouse Staff, IT, Procurement, Customer Service, etc. should all have input. WMS implementations affect more than just warehouse operations and these adjacent teams must have input at certain touchpoints to ensure the entire business model is supported by the technology about to be rolled out.
Conclusion: Let Strategy Lead
Ultimately, this isn’t the chicken or the egg problem, it’s a matter of strategic balance. Start with enough operational insight to guide your exploration. Then use WMS education to challenge assumptions and inspire better ways of working.
A Warehouse Management System should never be a bolt-on tool, it should enable smarter and more efficient operations. That’s only possible when your understanding of business and technology grow together, strategically. By taking this hybrid approach, companies can not only select the right WMS but implement it in a way that delivers measurable, lasting value.
At St. Onge Company we excel in guiding our clients through this process every day; from definition, to discovery, to implementation. Let us help guide you to the best fit technology solution for your business!
—Steve Williams, St. Onge Company
