Socius24 Looks to refresh independent Dispatcher-WMS contractors skills

Socius24 hears from our customers that there are a lot of ‘independent’ Dispatcher WMS contractors operating in the market. Clearly some are very knowledgeable with a wealth of experience. Unfortunately, many are not so and this cannot be good for either the contractors or customers who are employing them to implement their WMS investment effectively.
Socius24 also appreciates that many contractors are also only as knowledgeable as when they either worked at RedPrairie or their last customer version project. If they have managed to maintain their skills and learn new functionality on customer sites, then this is more by luck than design. Even those employed directly by RedPrairie on a customer implementation have not re-trained in new features available in later versions simply because training takes time and time with contractors is money.

Socius24 can change that and are offering education models and product assistance to those people who are either experts in a version of the product or feel they would benefit from improving their skills and knowledge on the latest releases.

Why would Socius24 want to educate the potential competition? Party because as the market evolves there will be a consolidation of expertise into three tiers of WMS contractors; namely:

• Those with skills that are current and up to date
• Those that had skills that are decaying every 6 months
• Those that have little or no idea having never been formally trained by anyone

Socius24 is building up a pool of Dispatcher WMS experts; in this Socius24 is becoming recognised as having the expertise and experience to supply the right level of people. When there is no differentiation in a market one price fits all be they good, average and bad.  Customers want the reassurance that when they work with Socius24 resources our people are worth their day-rate. And through continuous education and training their day-rate can attract a higher than market average rate. It also separates those that continually stay fresh from those low level skilled people.

Who wants to pay good money for lower quality resources?

Another reason is most independent WMS contractors do not have access to the latest versions of the product let alone knowledge in how a lot of existing functionality really works. So many times we have seen systems implemented in sub-optimal ways just because those ‘experts’ leading a customer’s implementation just did not know any better.

These situations are not good for our industry, our customer’s satisfaction and the overall results the Dispatcher-WMS solution can deliver. It is better for us all to have impressed customers telling their colleagues and industry peers that they received expert project services and their WMS implementation has exceeded all their KPI and ROI aspirations.