The WMS project owner: it might as well be you

Every WMS project needs an owner, and whoever becomes the WMS project owner ends up shaping most of what gets bought. Which is a fairly good reason for it to be you.

Around this time of year, there’s a meeting that happens in a lot of warehousing businesses. Sometimes it’s in the diary as “WMS review”. More often, though, it’s tagged onto something else and it lasts about ten rather stressful and stand-off-y minutes.

Operations will have turned up, armed with a list. It’ll detail what’s going wrong right now on the warehouse floor. It’ll talk about the workarounds that are having to be used to mitigate said problems, and it’ll also mention a spreadsheet that no-one really understands, but everyone knows that they still have to update. Finance will want to see some numbers, especially before anybody uses the word “investment” again. And IT will want to come along, if only to talk about how they’re already halfway through a very complex ERP upgrade and would rather not be handed a second hot potato, thanks very much and all that.

Everybody will agree that something needs to be done, and the meeting minutes will say (very clearly) “revisit WMS upgrade after peak”.

But after peak, it’s January and this year’s budget has already been set, so the same three people will have the same meeting the following October, only this time they’ll have a slightly longer list, and slightly higher stress levels.

Nobody in that room ACTIVELY said no, but then again… nobody had to. The new WMS project didn’t ever have an owner, so no-one championed it, and it was always somebody else’s problem.

Which meant that in your mind, it became an Ish-them, rather than an Ish-you.

To be fair to all three of the people in that room, each of them has a perfectly decent reason for keeping their hands in their pockets and their eyes on the floor. Ops has no budget and a day job that tends to double in November. Finance keeps being told about benefits that are framed in generalised, rather woolly concepts rather than by any effect they might have on Pounds Sterling, Euro, Dollar etc. And as for IT, well, any benefits to implementing something new will only ever turn up in the warehouse, but it’ll still be their phone that starts ringing at 2am.

So, effectively you have three perfectly sensible people, each waiting for one of the other two to crack first.

An ownerless project can’t stay ownerless for ever

The problems in the warehouse are going to carry on, and the system is going to get another year older, and sooner or later something is going to force the issue. A peak will go badly, or a new MD will arrive and ask why nothing’s been done to address optimisation, or maybe a customer (or two) will leave because of a problem that never got sorted, however many times they were promised that it would be.

At that point, the WMS project is going to be handed to whoever happens to be standing the closest, and paying the least attention to the conversation that’s going on around them. Which means that one of the three people in that meeting is going to end up holding the baby anyway, whether they like it or not.

So, I’m here to tell you that the WMS project owner might as well be you, and that the reason for this, rather than being altruistic, is an entirely selfish one.

The one who owns it, picks it

A WMS project involves a few hundred decisions, most of them are small and individually inconsequential (but collectively crucial). And those decisions get made according to whatever it is that the WMS project owner specifically cares about the most… which in turn means that the other two will get what they’re given.

If you run the warehouse and somebody else owns the project, you’ll be “consulted”, meaning that you’ll have to attend a workshop in month two and you’ll be sent a slide deck in month five, showing you the system that you’re getting. In contrast, if you’re the owner, you can make sure that the new WMS is specified around how your operation works when it’s most under pressure (rather than on its best day), and that your team leaders will get a say in the screens they’ll be staring at for the next ten years.

You’ll also, possibly most significantly, get to pick the go-live week, which otherwise might be chosen to suit the financial year end.

If you’re in Finance and somebody else owns the project, the first thing that you’ll get to see of the business case is a finished document, written by people who wanted the answer to be yes. And that means that anyone who starts to ask difficult questions right now is going to be cast as the villain of the piece, and people will start to mutter darkly about them, because Look What They Did.

IT probably has the strongest case of the three to be selfish. And that’s because IT are the ones who’ll be living with this system, long after the project team has finished its leaving drinks. So, if the project is IT’s, then the security requirements and integration standards are what will be set in stone – way before any vendor even enters the room. And any go-live will absolutely be scheduled to steer clear of their change freezes.

The phone is still going to ring at 2am now and then, but at least it’ll be for a system that THEY chose.

If you want our advice, in most warehouses it should be Ops who is the WMS project owner. And that’s because that’s where most of the disruption will be, and where most of the benefit will end up.

That said, any Finance or IT owner who actively wants the job will do better than an Ops owner who was told that they had to take it on. And any single one of the three will beat a steering group, absolutely hands down, every day of the week.

Name your price as WMS project owner

Here is a little-known secret, and you should use this information wisely… because you’ll never have more bargaining power for this project than you have during the minutes immediately after you’ve offered to take it on.

Feel this. Use this. CELEBRATE IT.

Everyone else in the room will be so massively relieved that they’ve not been picked as the Project Tribute, that right now is exactly the best time to ask for things that you want, and to get them written down on paper. Bonus points if you can get the other two to sign that paper while they’re still in the meeting.

Start with a decision date, meaning the date that the business will decide whether to go ahead or not. We suggest this because it’s far less frightening to commit to than an actual go-live date. Then allocate your time. A day or two a week is realistic, if you can get some of the day job actually taken off your desk. Please note that if you can’t, you’ll end up doing this at 9pm and probably doing it badly because you’ve already worked an exhaustingly full day.

Ask for a small budget that is allocated purely to finding things out. And make it separate from the capital decision, so that every line item doesn’t turn into a referendum on the whole project. As well as this, identify a named person from each of the other two departments, with their time agreed by their own managers, plus a note of who makes the final call from each department, and what they’ll need to see before they make it.

As WMS project owner, you’ll still need the other two onboard

Getting what you want has got a limit. And that limit is that the other two will have to sign onto it as well, in the end. So, give them what they’d have asked for if they were running the project. Ask Finance early on what evidence would convince them to make the leap and then build the case to that standard. Get IT’s non-negotiables on paper – and before you talk to anyone about anything technical. This will cost you very little, and, if you’ve done a decent job of it, by decision day, the other two will already have half agreed.

Why October is a good time to volunteer as WMS project owner

No one’s going to start a WMS project in the next ten weeks, which is EXACTLY as it should be. Putting your hand up to offer, however, is a totally different thing. Doing this will take one meeting, and the warehouse isn’t going to miss you for one meeting.

It’s also, coincidentally, the best time of year to be the owner, because the evidence you’ll need to accumulate is about to be lying around all over the floor (often quite literally).

Peak is when the overtime goes up and orders start missing the carrier cut-off. If the project is already your baby, you can write those numbers down as they happen. If you wait until February, somebody will have to piece them together from memory, using a spreadsheet that nobody trusts. And if you do that, you just know Finance will know that you know that they know that you might have made some of it up, a bit. Possibly. Perhaps.

If you’re not sure if the pain is bad enough to bother doing any of this yet, our article on how to know when you’re ready for a new WMS might help you to decide.

The things we’ve seen…

The team at Socius24 has been working with Dispatcher WMS since its earliest iterations in the 1990s. Projects that have gone well over the years have had not much more in common than the fact that nearly all of them had one WMS project owner on the customer side. And the fact that they all had the time and the authority to make decisions.

BY THE WAY… If you’re one of the three people who are likely to end up in this Project meeting, it might be worth forwarding this article to the other two, if only to see who volunteers first.

And if it would help to talk it through with somebody who’s seen it go both ways, we’re always happy to have a chat. You can even bring the other two with you, if you like.