One of the ways Sunbeam keeps operational costs at bay is by replacing the printed instructions for picking merchandise with radio frequency (RF) technology for advanced material handling that tells warehouse employees exactly what to pick and where. The RF devices eliminate the need for them to have to stop at a central location in the warehouse to get their pick assignments. To prevent the warehouse from running out of stock, Sunbeam is in the process of standardizing its replenishment method, which it calls assemble to order (ATO). The company is setting up standard, mathematically calculated safety stock levels, reorder points and reorder quantities across its 12 facilities. Standardizing on business and warehouse processes, even without standardizing on WMSs, also lets Sunbeam transfer warehouse employees and operations from one location to another without incurring training costs, and it offers the company greater visibility into its supply chain.

"The more standardized the approach, the more common the terminology that’s utilized, the better the different [warehouses] can talk with one another, the better the visibility the people in corporate have into what exactly is in those locations. Then they can do a better job of forecasting and planning," says Janowsky. And though it may not sound like a terribly high-tech best practice, Kean Westcott, director of field systems for Nexcom, and Cott’s Neary both advocate visual checks and manual counts to ensure both the accuracy of shipments and the accuracy of the data ultimately being fed into the WMS and the ERP system.

Those methods for dealing with multiple WMSs are applicable to any situation in which a business finds itself unavoidably dependent on disparate systems that are less-than-optimally integrated. "A CIO can do this kind of standardization in any particular aspect of the business," says CDM’s Venuti.

Best Practices For Running Multiple Systems

Find a tool to cross-reference your data. One of the biggest hassles associated with running multiple WMSs is having to make them interface with an ERP system?a task that gets even more complicated when it’s necessary to interface multiple WMSs with multiple ERP systems. Such is life for Cott and Sunbeam. To compensate for a lack of integration, data has to be manually keyed from one system into the other. But the more systems into which data must be entered manually, the greater the risk of screwing up. And when the numbers are wrong, products can get logged into the wrong physical locations in the warehouse; warehouse employees can’t find goods they need to ship because their instructions tell them the blue widgets are in lot #18 when they’re actually in lot #21; inventory counts can be inaccurate, and the business risks overcharging or undercharging, short-shipping or over-shipping customers for merchandise they may not have ordered.