Analysts Outline WMS Trends

Supply Chain Management Review staff -- Supply Chain Management Review, 9/7/2006

The warehouse management system (WMS) market has matured with analyst firms such as AMR Research and ARC showing slower growth rates. As the market enters into this new phase, new patterns and trends are developing.

According to a recent presentation by ARC Advisory Group analyst Adrian Gonzalez, the tier-one market is saturated. As a result, the market is seeing significant consolidation and growth will be found in the small and mid-sized market and Asia. At the same time, sales of add-on modules like labor management and slotting are growing faster than the core application. Finally the market as a whole is ripe for a transition toward service-oriented architecture and component-based architecture.

The AberdeenGroup expands on this last trend in its Market Alert “The On-Demand Warehouse: WMS for the Future?”Aberdeen identifies how on-demand software or “software as a service” is just starting to enter the WMS market. Yet its promise of lower price points and easier implementations will make it attractive, especially to smaller enterprises. In fact, 64 percent of surveyed executives said they would consider an on-demand solution for WMS. The alert says that on-demand is particularly appropriate for enterprises with revenues of less than $250 million annually that have manual or rudimentary throughput strategies.