So if the business is running multiple WMSs that don’t interface with its ERP system, the CIO must establish some checks and balances to make sure that the data is identical across systems.

One such check and balance Cott’s Neary uses to prevent data from being corrupted is to triangulate, as he calls it, inventory counts from three sources: the data captured from scanning the bar codes of finished and raw materials, the hand counts of goods in the warehouse and the numbers in the ERP system. By triangulating, the 46-year-old CIO means comparing. He says the company double-checks to make sure that all billings in the ERP system match all shipments in the WMS and that all goods received match all invoices. "When you’re able to triangulate data, your systems can identify inconsistencies right away," he says.

To compare billing, shipping and invoicing information across different systems, Neary has configured his systems so that they automatically synchronize with one another on a regular basis and feed a data warehouse. He uses Web-based business intelligence applications from Hyperion (Essbase and Analyzer) to recognize any anomalies in the data. Inconsistencies between the ERP system and the WMS are automatically flagged when information is extracted from the data warehouse, and transformed and loaded into the business intelligence application. Neary uses translation tables and cross-reference tables to ensure that similar brands, package types and flavor types coming from different systems all map appropriately to the rules established in the business intelligence application.

And in about half of Cott’s warehouses, Neary has written interfaces between the legacy ERP system and WMS. Though writing interfaces is one of the headaches of having to support multiple WMSs, having the interface has eliminated the need to manually rekey inventory transactions into the ERP system, he says.

Standardize wherever and however you can. Sunbeam runs two different WMSs, as well as a few custom programs for its 12 distribution centers. For Sunbeam?like a lot of companies?running multiple WMSs is the lesser of two evils. Although doing so drives up cost, right now the company has chosen not to standardize because of the high implementation cost. Vice President of IT Janowsky says that for Sunbeam, the benefits of standardizing on one WMS don’t outweigh the cost. During the past several years, the company has been in acquisition mode. If it had to implement a standardized WMS in each new warehouse it took over, that would be all he’d have time and money to do, Janowsky says. Instead, Sunbeam standardizes on the business process end.