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The personalisation of e-commerce is putting even more pressure on the warehouse and supply chain, meaning that warehouse management systems will have to react. Is artificial intelligence the answer? Christopher Walton investigates… If racking, shelving and forklifts are the muscles and bones of intralogistics then a good Warehouse Management System (WMS) is the nervous system. Without accurate instruction the constituent parts would not function. But the building blocks in the warehouse are changing dramatically – automation, robots and cobots are changing materials handling, but so is the way that businesses engage with customers. Furthermore, when WMS was developed in the late 1990s and early 2000s it was a system to register stock; where it was in the warehouse and how it was delivered to customers. Now it is much more about optimising how the warehouse runs, managing people and equipment in the warehouse – as well as managing the stock. Enterprise level businesses piled into WMS in the early 2000s, post dot-com boom when a huge amount of IT spending and investment was taking place. The problem is, some enterprise level businesses have not evolved their WMS since that point, so the systems are old. But the enterprise is so incredibly reliant on them that ripping them out and starting again is not an option. Emile Naus, partner at BearingPoint, says that this is fundamentally a problem at vendor level, with some blue-chip IT companies treating WMS as a mature market, in much the same way that retail forecasting systems are treated. Yet for many logistics and supply chain operations they are in the infancy of their WMS adoption. Up-front costs The market innovation, argues Naus, is coming at an SME-level and through system integrators: “What we are seeing is a lot of smaller businesses affording to go for […]