Integrated Logistics and Warehouse Management In the Cloud
According to John Santagate in a recent IDC Manufacturing Insights paper, he wrote, “firms that are able to design business processes and implement enabling systems with the objective of creating a seamless flow of information and action relative to supply chain execution often outperform their peers.”*
Unfortunately, most of today’s operations are built in a piecemeal approach with outdated and disconnected solutions that aren’t designed to work well together. In a recent Inspirage webinar LogFire’s Founder and CEO, and now VP Product Strategy of Oracle WMS Cloud, Diego Pantoja-Navajas, provided an overview of LogFire the world class WMS Cloud solution that’s now part of the Oracle SCM Cloud family.
IDC research analyst, John Santagate, discussed the benefits of an integrated logistics management solution and the advantages of deploying a WMS in the Cloud. John shared ways to asses if your current application has the capability to scale and support the future needs of the business by looking outside the box to Cloud-based applications that are shaking up the WMS application landscape and providing scalable, flexible, and cost-effective options for those willing to modernize and evolve. See John’s question and answer session below.
Wrapping up the webinar, Inspirage’s Chris Eller, Vice President, Solution Management, West Region, shared how Inspirage can help companies adopt a cloud solution with benefits of increased revenue opportunities, faster implementations and lower TCO. Watch the full webinar or download the powerpoint for more information or visit the webpage with more details.
In a question and answer session John Santagate covered the following:
You talked about a lot of benefits of cloud, are there still some risks of using WMS on the cloud?
I think yes, there are some risks that remain, but I believe that to be true about all technology and indeed we have seen the traditional risks of consistent connectivity and network security become a bit mitigated as these areas have largely been addressed in the mature markets.
Companies that move to the cloud should work with their providers to address the connectivity and security issues through SLA’s. However, I believe that the benefits far outweigh the risks relative to WMS on the cloud. Another risk to consider is role based access. Companies moving to WMS on the cloud must ensure that their vendor has appropriate strategies and tools in place to enable a company to manage user access. The biggest risk is that of downtime (a bit of a function of connection and service). Again, with modern technology, cloud WMS vendors have become very good at maintaining uptime and working with customers to manage any scheduled downtime.
There is a lot of talk about digital transformation in the market, how does cloud fit in here?
For companies that are currently running all of their applications on-premise, moving applications to the cloud is itself a step in digital transformation. Digital transformation means different things to companies at different levels of technology maturity and cloud is most certainly a technology area that should be a part of a digital transformation strategy.
For more details, visit our webpage or download the webinar or powerpoint here.
