We can’t spare the people: who goes on your WMS implementation team

Nobody wants to lose their best ops manager to a WMS implementation team for six months. And that’s totally understandable. But before you send someone else along instead, you might want to have a look at what doing so might cost you.

I bet you’ve got one. Most places do. The ops manager who knows why the mezzanine picks have to go out before the ground floor ones on a Thursday, but definitely not on a Monday, when it’s the other way around. The one who knows which carrier rep will still answer the phone after five o’clock on a Friday, who knows which of the top fifty SKUs are totally lying about their actual dimensions. You know, things like that. She’s been with the company for eleven years, and when she takes a week off, the warehouse WhatsApp group goes very quiet at the start of the week… and then gets quite heated by Wednesday lunchtime.

Anyway, a WMS project comes up, and somebody from the vendor says, “six months”. Which is when everyone round the table looks at her, and when you say ‘We can’t spare the people’.

Which is fair enough. Peak’s coming. Her deputy’s good, but he’s not her, and the last time she was off for a couple of weeks, the returns backlog took the best part of a quarter to clear. Nobody’s arguing with any of that. It’s just that there are only three options available to you, if you’re going to do this project, and you’re going to end up with one of them whether you pick it deliberately, or not.

Send in the deputy

This is the obvious compromise. She stays on the floor, your second-best option is allocated to the WMS implementation team, and everyone’s happy.

For about a month.

But then the design workshops start, and the vendor (that’ll be us, if it’s us) starts asking all of the questions that a WMS project has to ask – if it’s going to work out properly. Things like which (if any) of the four ways that you currently receive goods you’d like to keep, what happens to a short pick on a Friday afternoon before a bank holiday, why that specific thing always gets counted twice, and so on and so forth (and those questions will probably go on for a significant amount of time if your vendor is doing their job right). Your deputy knows most of the answers. The trouble is that for the ones he doesn’t, there’s a big difference between knowing how something’s done and knowing why it’s ended up being done like that in the first place.

So, he has two options available to him. Either he goes back to her, in which case she’s on the project anyway, but now it’s in twenty-minute chunks, between everything else, and with none of the context and all of the interruptions. Which means you’ve lost her time anyway, but you’ve also ended up with a slower project for your trouble. Or, he makes the call himself, because that’s what he was sent to do, and six months down the line, she walks into a go-live for a system that has been built round somebody else’s idea of how her warehouse works.

Which is not ideal.

None of this is the deputy’s fault. He might be very good at his job. He just didn’t have the authority and the experience he needed to do it the way she would have done, and a WMS project is mostly a very long list of decisions that have to be made by SOMEONE.

There is a way of doing this that works, mind you, but it’s the other way round. If he’s going to be running that warehouse in a few years anyway, give him the warehouse for six months with her on the end of a phone, and send her to the WMS implementation team. He gets six months of acting up, which is something that you’d struggle to give him in any other way, and the system gets designed by the person who knows why things are the way they are – and how they could be better.

Doing it on top of the day job

This is the one that most people end up with; she keeps the whole of her day job and then does the project on top.

The workshops go in her diary and then get moved around. The vendor sends a question on Tuesday and eventually gets an answer back the following Monday, at 9pm, which is the only time available for any project thinking to get done. User Acceptance Testing (UAT) gets done by whoever happens to be free. And it’s quite possible that by month four the vendor’s project manager has stopped asking questions that they never get answers to (as they watch the go-live date rapidly approaching like a freight train), and instead, they’ve started to make educated guesses. Which is exactly how you end up with a system that works beautifully… for a warehouse that doesn’t actually quite exist.

And in this version, please know, you’ve lost her anyway.

It’s just happening more slowly, and without any conscious decisions ever having been made. The warehouse gets a distracted manager for six months and the project gets a knackered one, and at the end of it she’s (totally reasonably) had enough of both. If this happens, you can just bet that there’ll be a recruiter lurking on LinkedIn somewhere who absolutely agrees that enough is enough and it’s time to move on.

Want to know more about things to look out for? Have a read through the ways WMS implementations fail – this reason is in most of them somewhere. As well as all of the decisions that nobody was ever given enough time to make.

Send her into the WMS implementation team, and suck it up

This looks the most expensive option on the day that you agree to do it. But by the end of the project, it probably won’t end up that way.

Six months is the wrong number anyway, or at least, it’s the wrong kind of number. What a project like this takes out of your people’s time is lumpy and uneven. It’s a lot at the start, while all of the processes are being decided, then it goes quiet in the middle while the vendor’s building and configuring, and then it gets heavy again for testing and training and go-live. It’s more likely to entail a couple of days a week early on, most of the week around testing, training and go-live, and then there’ll be weeks in the middle of the project where she’s barely needed at all. (We went through the timeline of this kind of project in much more detail in How long a WMS implementation actually takes .)

So, the time can be backfilled. But not by finding another her, because there isn’t one. The deputy can run the warehouse, as above, and perhaps you might need some agency cover on the floor, so that he can move up. Then a few things probably need to come off her list for the duration, starting with the meetings that she’s only in because she’s always been in them, as well as the returns queue that she’s been personally clearing since about 2019.

Once you identify all of the above, write it down. Which days, which meetings she’s excused from, who signs stuff off instead of her. Because if it isn’t written down, her day job is going to win out every time.

If you really can’t spare her for the WMS implementation team

You may well have read all of the above and still be thinking, no, we really can’t. The place doesn’t run without her, and six months of the deputy in charge will probably end up with at least one lost customer.

And that might be totally realistic.

But if it’s true, you’ve just uncovered something infinitely more useful than anything that you might have learned from reading this article.

Because if your warehouse falls over when one person is away for a few weeks, then that’s a risk you’ve been carrying since well before anyone mentioned a new WMS. And it’s also a risk that isn’t going anywhere. She’ll go on holiday at some point, or get poached, or someone might get ill, and then the thought experiment that we’ve been talking about in this article is going to start to happen anyway, whether you like it or not. And a project like this is about the only version of it where you get to pick the timing and while she’s still in the building.

It also, if you think about it, massively makes a case for implementing your new system.

She can’t be spared because all the processes live in her head. But a decent WMS is exactly where those processes could start to live, and that way, the next person can run the warehouse from the system rather than from memory. Which also means she can finally take a fortnight off without everything in the warehouse grinding to a halt.

Which makes your “we can’t spare her” a bit of an interesting reason for not getting a new WMS. Just saying.

Coming soon…

We’ll go through the first ninety days of an implementation, week by week, what you’re expected to provide and when. By the end of it, the generalised “six months” we’ve talked about here will hopefully have turned into an actual estimated number of days that you can have a proper think about.

In the meantime, if you’d like to know what a Dispatcher WMS project would take from your people before you decide if you can spare them, we’re always happy to have a chat. And bring her along… she’ll ask better questions than you.