If your warehouse is a key part of your business the Warehouse Management System (WMS) that drives it is a critical part of your infrastructure. It’s important that it’s reliable, responsive, allows you to work the way you want to, and is well supported.

Nowadays reliability should be a given, but the support offered by your WMS supplier should do far more than just ensure the platform is available. What distinguishes outstanding support is the speed with which your supplier helps you respond to changes in your business. Our own OrderFlow platform is very much a ‘second system’ for users that have outgrown a more entry-level alternative. From our experience far more people are driven to look for an alternative supplier by poor customer service rather than missing functionality.

Your warehouse processes will inevitably need to evolve as the needs of your business change. Sometimes the changes might be very fundamental, more often they’ll be incremental improvements that allow you to continually refine the way you do things.

Big changes:

• Adding additional warehouses, integrating with drop shippers or supporting multi-line cross docking.
• Introducing a new warehouse layout e.g. introducing a new mezzanine or push through racking.
• Moving from an exclusive B2B or B2C model to a hybrid environment to fulfil both B2C and B2B from the same stockholding.

Little changes

• Moving some or all your despatches to new carrier services.
• Refining your putaway and replenishment logic as volumes change.
• Introducing lot tracking or serial number tracking for some of your SKUs.
• Supporting integration with new external systems.
• Refining your picking processes as the profile of your order pool changes.

It’s important to find a supplier who is happy to foster an ongoing relationship with you and recognizes that your WMS platform will need to continually change. You should be able to discuss possible changes with someone who understands warehouse processes, knows your business and has actually visited your warehouse themselves. Once the changes are agreed the execution should be quick, professional and cost effective.

At OrderFlow we’ve designed our business to ensure we can offer outstanding support. Our support team and development team sit together in the same office, they work closely together and we deliberately try to blur the distinction between the two roles. Every member of the development team takes an occasional turn on the support roster, responding to routine customer queries. Similarly, our dedicated support staff are all able to deploy and configure complex solutions. We aim to resolve as many issues as possible straightaway rather than relying on ‘first line’ support to asking a few predefined questions and before passing your issue to someone else.

We know that good customer service is the most important element of any WMS offering and we’re confident that we offer the best service levels in the sector. That’s one of the reasons we don’t tie our customers into annual contracts, if we keep on getting it right we don’t think you’ll want to leave.

When choosing their first WMS system people naturally focus on features, when choosing their second they put far more emphasis on support.

If you find yourself waiting days for a response to simple support queries or if making significant changes to your environment seems impossible, give us a call to discuss how we might work together.