Warehouse Management Benefits

S3CO Root WMS Pick System (Click Caption to Enlarge)

S3CO Root WMS's real-time warehouse management system can help you increase your worker, process, and inventory accuracy and efficiency. Customer service levels can improve as a result of this accuracy and efficiency gain. These gains can then boost your most important metric, your bottom line. Improved inventory accuracy can allow you to run a lean operation with little safety stock - allowing you to concentrate on your most productive and highest-velocity items.

• Increased worker productivity and process improvements
• Significant cost savings by eliminating excess inventory and reducing safety stock
• Dramatically improved space utilization
• Elimination of data entry errors and double-keying of information
• Improved customer service levels
• Lower total cost of ownership from the elimination of safety stock and under-performing items
• Completely customizable warehouse management with user-definable parameters
• Real-time warehouse processing allows for continuous monitoring and 100% accuracy since users are not forced into infeasible transactions - all picks and putaways are recorded, not just the recommended ones
• Multiple warehouse support means that you do not need to implement duplicate systems in different locations, saving you licensing fees, administration costs, and complexity headaches
  
• Supports contract warehousing with multiple owner capabilities
• Cross-docking functionality
• Intelligent picking algorithm - more picks per hour due to task interleaving
  
• Intelligent prime location algorithm - the system suggests prime locations for greater efficiency of high-velocity inventory
• Complete inventory transparency, know where all inventory is at any time - including material handling equipment
• Inventory management functions allow users to easily move products from one location to another by scanning location barcodes
• Paperless picking allows users to select a picking ticket from a list of open tickets generated by the system using any web-enabled terminal
• Quantities are adjusted in real-time as picked / put away items are scanned
• Users have the ability to print scannable barcode labels for products, inventory locations, groups, and receipts
• Users can create and print new barcode labels to be associated with products on the fly
• Quick receipt function allows staff to rapidly get new inventory into your business system
• Common picking / put away interface for all users (PCs, PDAs, etc.) - only one system for your employees to learn
• Warehouse design / location sequence ordering tools - we provide tools to allow you to redesign your warehouse and picking sequences
• Hardware / software / tool agnostic - we do not dictate what other supply chain systems you use, we can integrate with any of them
  
• Robust security and role definitions - we provide an auditable mechanism to not allow unathorized access to vital system components, but also allow access to those who need it

Warehouse Intelligence / Analytics Benefits

S3CO Root WMS Dashboard (Click Caption to Enlarge)

S3CO Root WMS's Warehouse Intelligence allows you to better understand your warehousing operation. Metrics (measurements) describing employee productivity, warehouse productivity, order performance, etc. allow you to quantify how your warehouse is performing, and more importantly how your warehouse is performing compared to your organization's goals.

Would you like to know for a fact who your best picker is? Would you like to know the worst? Would you like to know how the 2nd shift compares with the first? Do you know how you're performing compared to this time last year, how about your warehouse's performance on the first day of the month compared to the last day of the month? Warehouse Intelligence allows you to answer these questions, letting you manage what you can now measure.

• Manage what you can now measure
• Calculates and reports critical warehouse management metrics
• Real-time employee performance monitoring and reports
• Warehouse monitoring
• System dashboards
• Persistent statistics allow system administrators to track performance over time for groups and locations
  

S3CO Vision Benefits

S3CO Root WMS was designed to integrate seamlessly into your existing environment. We are agnostic about what ERP, hardware, operating system, or database you use. Since we have no legacy code to maintain, we can complement your existing environment using today's best practices and standards. Best of all, we are designed as a system of components, so as technology changes we are well-equipped to handle both minor and major changes to your operating environment.

• S3CO Root WMS was designed to complement existing business systems, as a way to better understand and orchestrate your warehouse
• S3CO Root WMS has the benefit of being architected in the age of Enterprise Architecture; S3CO Root WMS has no legacy code to maintain and all code as been developed in components, or modules, for easy modification in the future

Price Benefits

S3CO Root WMS was designed to handle the needs of any sized customer. We have configurations designed to handle Tier 1 warehouses, but more importantly we offer versions with the same core picking algorithms targeted at medium and small-scale warehouses. Our position is that any warehouse can benefit from a warehouse management system. Traditional WMS pricing prohibited most warehouses from reaping its benefits - we're looking to change that.

• S3CO targets Root WMS to the scale of its customers - different configurations are available for your particular operation

Technology Benefits

S3CO Root WMS is an enterprise-quality application written with today's best practices. Our philosophy is that technology should complement your business, not dictate it. We have designed Root WMS to be as open as possible, following open standards wherever possible. Our goal is to make our software as easy to integrate with your existing business environment as possible.

• S3CO Root WMS was architected to conform with Java EE (J2EE) Enterprise Architecture standards

• Java EE (J2EE)-compliant application developed with JavaServer Faces (JSF)
• n-Tier web application
• Distinct Integration, Presentation, Application, and Data Layers based on the OSI Model
• JDBC open database connectivity
• Facilitates service-oriented architecture (SOA) support for warehouse data and metrics
• Comprehensive enterprise-class integration support
• Load balancing
• Failover / disaster recovery support high availability
• Enterprise-quality backup facilities

• S3CO Root WMS Management server supports any Java-enabled hardware or software platform
• Web-based applications reduce active client-server data transfers, reducing network traffic, increasing performance, and reducing the need for WAN upgrades. Strains on remote and WAN connections are removed because all process traffic resides on the S3CO Root WMS server and only presentation logic is transferred across the network.
• Web-based application removes the need for high-powered user compute machinery and end-user client upgrades
• Supports your existing architecture and infrastructure - we do not mandate any specific technologies as a part of your implementation
  
• Supports open source software to reduce the operating system and database licensing costs associated with most WMS installations

• Supports the open source operating system Linux
• Supports open source database management systems: PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.

Performance Benefits

S3CO Root WMS is a web application developed using Java technologies. Java runs on virtual machines on any number of 32-bit or 64-bit processors; this processing scale across multiple CPUs means that S3CO can scale to meet your demanding business. Additionally, since Root WMS integrates openly with any JDBC-compliant database, we can scale from the data layer as well using any of today's rapidly advancing database platforms. Plus, the interaction between the system and the end user is via HTML, so the network demand is very light - enhancing performance across slow connections or great distances.

• Web applications deliver high performance and rapid response times across already saturated networks - S3CO Root WMS requires only HTML presentation data to traverse the network, transaction data remains on the system server.
• Supports scale for even the most demanding warehouses
• Supports load balancing and failover for high availability

Flexibility Benefits

S3CO Root WMS is built as a system of modules, or components, designed to run on any Java-enabled platform and interface with any third party applications via APIs or TCP/IP. Any single module can be modified to meet the needs of a particular environment, without interfering with the interactions between the other modules. S3CO Consulting can customize components beyond their current parameterization, or your internal Java development resources could do this work.

• Supports any Java-enabled hardware or software platform
• Supports complete user customization
• Supports enteprise integration standards for cross-system connectivity
  
• Supports user development for tighter integration with business and shipping systems
• Supports user development for proprietary client features

Administration Benefits

S3CO Root WMS (Click Caption to Enlarge)

S3CO Root WMS was designed to make the job of managing your warehouse as easy as possible. An integral component of this design was our central administration facilities. We provide for any number of administrators to simultaneously monitor your warehouses, inventory, and employees.

Facilities exist for your administrators to be alerted or paged when error conditions that you have defined have occurred. Administrators then have the power to view central system logs and specific error messages to diagnose problems. Users can then interact with administrators through the system, allowing them to ask questions or escalate issues. All of this means that you proactively monitor your warehouse to avoid failures, and if one should occur you are equipped to get your warehouse back online as soon as possible.

• Centralized administration
• Simplified communication between warehouse personnel, managers, and administrators
• Escalation and paging strategies
  
• Centralized logging
• Auditability