The First 90 Days of a WMS Implementation | Socius24

The first 90 days of a WMS implementation: what happens, week by week

A few weeks ago, we talked about how ‘six months’ was the wrong kind of number for an implementation. This article talks about how the first 90 days of a WMS implementation usually go, roughly week by week, and what you’ll probably be asked for while it’s going on.

Every project’s a little bit different. And that’s because every operation is different.

For example, a 3PL with twenty-five separate clients and a bonded warehouse is a different animal entirely from a single-site manufacturer of bulk SKUs. Which means that the estimates below really are estimates. However, the order in which they happen is usually the same.

For the sake of argument, the ops manager from a couple of weeks ago is now running your new project (good choice). Let’s imagine that she’s now officially the owner of Project WMS, so most of what follows is what will happen for her.

Before things get started

A few things will need sorting out before anybody from our side turns up. Somebody needs to own it, they should have a name, and we talked about who that person should ideally be here, if you missed it. Anyway, she’ll have people who also need to be involved (not all of the time, but when actually required). These people might include a team leader or two from the floor, e.g. the people who actually do the carrier cut-off and who know which of the ‘pallets’ to be shipped are, in fact, two pallets. Somebody from IT who understands how your ERP works.

There’s probably also somebody from Finance who’ll come to the steering meeting and ask about money. You’ll have at least started the conversation about where your new WMS is going to run – on your own kit or somebody else’s cloud. And you’ll have had an honest look at whether your processes are written down anywhere. In our experience, most aren’t. And that’s fine, it just changes what the workshops might look like a bit.

We’ll talk about data later, but bonus points if you’ve already started checking stuff before we arrive.

The first fourteen

Kick-off lasts about a day, usually. We’ll go through the plan, who’s who, how often we’ll meet (e.g. a short call each week, a steering group once a month etc), and where decisions will get written down so that no one has to remember what was decided, months after the decision was made. After that, we will go for a walk round the warehouse (in person or on some occasions, where the site is thousands of miles away, virtually) with the people who run it.

This is implementation gold, and most likely more important than anything that anyone could have told us.

During the first fortnight we’ll be after numbers. All of the numbers. Things that we’re usually interested in: orders per day, lines per order, SKUs, locations, pallets in and parcels out, and what all of the above tends to look like the week before Christmas. We’ll want to know what systems you’ve got, the ERP, the web shop, any other channels you use, the carriers, and anything with a spreadsheet that’s been holding things together. We’ll want the racking plan and if you’re reorganising things, we’d very much appreciate a first stab at how you’d like your locations named. In the context of your Project Lead, this will amount to about two to three days of her time, give or take, and perhaps half a day each from a few others.

The workshops

Weeks two to five; this is the intense stretch that we talked about here. We’ll take your processes one at a time: receiving, putaway, picking, despatch, returns, stock counts, and whatever’s peculiar to your operation, and we’ll go through each of them – in depth. What happens right now, what happens when it goes wrong, what you’d like to happen, ideally, and which of the four ways you currently do things you’d like to keep (if any) going forward.

Your Project Lead needs to be in the room for this, and so does whoever is currently doing that job (meaning that we’ll want to talk to a team leader rather than a manager). Managers know what’s supposed to happen, team leads know what actually does happen. You can estimate about half a day to two days per workshop, and at least eight to twelve of them depending on how complicated your operation is. Then, there’ll be homework in between, write-up, clarifications, chasing the answers that nobody had on hand during the workshops, things like that.

All of the above will result in a document. It will describe how your warehouse is going to work, and you’ll be signing it in a few weeks.

For your Project Lead this’ll take maybe three or four days a week for the first month to six weeks. It’ll require a day a week or so for each team leader, and you’ll need someone from IT in the room whenever we touch on talking to your ERP (or whatever other existing systems you’ll be integrating with your new WMS).

IT and data, running alongside

Interfaces start next. These will mostly entail your IT person and ours going through things in intricate detail. They’ll discuss orders and the item master coming in from the ERP, receipts and despatches and stock adjustments going back to it. They’ll talk about the carriers, and if you’re a 3PL, whatever your clients send you. Each one of these will need a sample of the real thing, a field mapping, and an agreement about who owns what. We’ll need your ERP partner’s details early on, as well as a slot booked in their diary to make sure that we’ve got everything we need. This will look like two or three days a week for IT while it’s going on, and you’ll probably need to give a fortnight’s notice to your ERP partner before you actually need to talk to them.

Next up, we’ll deal with the unglamorous things. In practice these are the kinds of things that tend to stop go-lives. You’ll need a proper Wi-Fi survey, and by ‘proper’, we mean the mezzanine and the yard and the chiller. Everywhere. You need to identify any place that the signal drops. And you’ll need to fix it. Handhelds and printers will need to be ordered early, (we work with some great partners and are always happy to make introductions, to save you guessing) because the lead times are sometimes longer than anyone expects them to be. You’ll also need somebody in IT who can say yes to spending money on them. And a decision about how people are going to log in to what, when – and what spares you need to run all of your shifts.

Data starts in week four or so…

This is usually a job that nobody wants to do, which if you’ve ever done it, is totally understandable. It’s also what determines if your go-live happens easily and smoothly over a 24-hour period, or if it’s dragged out, kicking and screaming over an agonised two weeks. Item master first, dimensions and weights, pack sizes and configurations, barcodes, what can’t go up top and what needs to be kept separate.

Incidentally, you don’t need to sign on with us (or anyone) before you start cleaning up your data.

Time spent doing that is never lost, and you could get started on it now, before you’ve even decided which WMS you’re going to pick. Because, as everyone knows: “Rubbish data in, rubbish results out.”

After doing this, you’ll need to look at your locations. We suggest that they’re named so that they’ll make sense to somebody with a scanner in one hand and a pallet truck in the other. Then you’ll need to look at your customers, suppliers, carriers, and users. You’ll provide data extracts and identify someone who owns cleaning everything up when (not if) problems appear. This is usually not someone from IT. It needs to be someone who knows why the dimensions are all wrong, and what you never mix with what, where.

It’s a faff, and depending on your data set, it’ll be at least a solid week’s work spread over a month. And then your Project Lead will need at least a couple of half days to check it.

Sign-off, then build

Once all of that is completed, your design document will come back to you, including everything that was identified and decided during the workshops. Your Project Lead will need to read it, all of it, and then she’ll want to revisit anything that isn’t exactly as she wants it to be.

This is important, because it’s after this point that things start to get built, which means that changes further down the line will start to get expensive. Labels and paperwork will be included in this design, and it’s at this stage that a go-live date will likely be pencilled in (avoiding peak and critical staff holidays at all costs). This will take two or three days for her to read it properly and to round up everyone’s comments, and then there’ll be a session or two with us to lock down any undefined spaces.

After that, we start to configure. Which means that the Project Lead’s workload with us drops, or at least it ought to. What does continue through the following weeks is frequent meetings, where we show your lead the system, doing the processes that she defined, and where she confirms or pushes back on what they look like.

There will be testing required too, and the more the better.

We’ll give you guidance, but the scenarios you use will need to come from your real orders. We suggest that you should not only run through the standard scenarios, but also the odd ones, the edge cases especially. Interface testing starts once both ends of the pipe have been built, which means that your ERP partner’s diary will matter again. Then we’ll do a first trial load of your data, so that everyone can see the state of the item master – before it can do any real damage. Next, super users need to be finalised and their cover arranged, because training starts not long afterwards. This will probably look like a day a week for your Project Lead, half a day for a couple of team leaders, and then IT in bursts.

By now, you’ll have a system that handles your processes, you’ll have interfaces that have been built and partly tested, and you’ll have loaded your data at least once (so that you’ll know how… exciting things might get if you leave it that way). You’ll have a test plan, a training plan, and a go-live date with a runway to go with it: big bang or phased. And you’ll have decided what happens to stock counts either side of the aforementioned go-live. What’s left to do now is the UAT, SIT, SAT, (ask if you’re not sure what these TLAs mean) training, data rehearsals and cutover. But we’ll save those things for another day.

So… the number

As you can see, timings are likely to vary. And that’s because your project will be different to any other project. Which also means that anybody who will give you a concrete number of days without having done any of the investigation we’ve discussed above is totally making it up.

Your Project Lead: three or four days a week through the workshops, a day or so a week during build. Somewhere between thirty-five and fifty-five days across the first ninety we’ve touched on here.

IT: two or three days a week while your interfaces are being designed. Then, on and off in bursts. Twenty to thirty-five days. Ish.

Team leaders: this’ll be about half a day to two days per workshop, plus the meetings to confirm that the config is doing what they thought it would. Four to eight days each, and you’ll probably want more than one team lead to check your workings.

Whoever owns the data: maybe ten to fifteen days, all of them will be hideously boring and all of them are absolutely mission critical. The cleaner your data, the better everything will be.

Finance: a couple of hours a month for any steering meetings, and one significant conversation about the business case in week one. We wrote about that here.

So, the time that will be required of your people is essentially going to be heavy for about a month to six weeks, lighter for the next three or four, or so, and then heavy again at the end. It’s the kind of thing that you can (and should) plan around.

Where the first 90 days can go horribly wrong

Most of the mistakes we’ve written about before happen during these first weeks, and most of the problems with implementations that fail were caused here rather than during go-live.

Decisions get put off in the workshops and then made too fast during UAT. The ERP partner doesn’t get involved until somebody needs to talk to them urgently and then can’t get a meeting until days later. The data gets left until testing, when it’s a bit late to do much about it. And the Wi-Fi survey gets skipped because, well, the signal’s fine in the office.

If you’d like to know what the first 90 days might look like for your warehouse rather than a roughly average one, we’re always happy to have a chat. The walk around will be on us.