"Standardization [of business and warehouse processes] enables us to put together a simple, straightforward planning and training process that’s easily transferable to various locations," says Janowsky, addressing the problem of training workers when they move from one warehouse (and one WMS) to another.

For example, the the company is currently deploying a single ATO process across all of its warehouses. That means each warehouse has the same processes for handling shipments of incoming goods and raw materials and for handling outgoing shipments of finished goods to its retail customers.

As for replenishment, the distribution centers all use the same process for calculating safe stock levels so that they don’t run out of goods. So if the company had to move an employee who worked on the loading dock of the facility in Hattiesburg, Miss., to the facility in Waynesboro, Pa., the individual wouldn’t have to learn a new process for getting shipments onto trucks, for unloading shipments into the distribution center or for reordering merchandise.

Standardizing on a single ATO process effectively allows Sunbeam to establish best practices for running its warehouses as well as benchmarks for comparing each facility’s performance?two activities that can be impossibly difficult, or simply impossible, when a company is running multiple WMSs, according to CDM’s Venuti. If a company’s five distribution centers are running different WMSs, he says, they’ll all have different perspectives on how a facility should be run, how orders should be fulfilled and what the best staffing levels are. You can’t benchmark their performance, since they’re managed inconsistently.

Janowsky disagrees. "Having a standard ATO process helps us measure the effectiveness [of each warehouse], and by having a standard approach for measuring our effectiveness, we can tell what the proper staffing requirements, storage requirements and overhead expenses would be for a particular location," he says.

To further facilitate moving warehouse employees from one location to another, Long says, the IT department has configured software from J.D. Edwards that’s used in several of the distribution centers so that the menu options to print pick tickets, shipping labels, shipping confirmation, print manifests and bills of lading are identical across locations.

"The closer you get to the cookie-cutter approach, the more interchangeable and useable you make people," says Janowsky.

If all else fails, get your hands dirty. When battling with multiple systems, sometimes your best strategy will be to rely on good, old-fashioned human sweat. If you can’t trust your systems to generate proper orders, use your employees to double- and triple-check shipments and inventory levels. After all, you can hold them accountable for mistakes and foster a "we try harder" spirit among them much easier than you can a computer.