Future proof your warehouse with a cloud-based WMS

Even when your warehouse operations seem to be running smoothly, there is always room for improvement and a need to stay up to date with innovation. While steps are taken to keep warehouse operations at peak performance, when fulfillment times and levels are jeopardized, it’s still up to you and your team to race to recover, to ensure actions to get back on track are taken correctly so that product can make its way out the door, and time is always working against you.

If your organization previously reviewed and dismissed the value of moving your warehouse management system (WMS) to the cloud, it’s time to reevaluate. Decisions that seemed to make sense last year or even last quarter, likely look very different with new challenges emerging over the past several months. By empowering critical systems like a WMS with cloud capabilities, your organization can scale quickly, maximize productivity, and minimize outages and downtime to prevent bringing the company’s mission-critical operations to its knees.

Losses caused by system outages can be initially staggering and ultimately far-reaching, impacting not only revenue and productivity but also long-term brand value. It’s been estimated that the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute, with $140,000 per hour on the low end and as much as $540,000 per hour at the higher end. Internally absorbing the actions to resolve the issue on-premise and then putting in place actions across the organization to recover from the critical failure and its consequences can derail an organization even further.

But what if you could offload that preparation, training, and responsibility to a solution partner you can trust to manage it all for you? With choosing a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for your WMS, experts who are contractually committed to ensuring your warehouse stays up and running are shouldering that burden.

Not only can you remove this time-consuming responsibility from your list, but when a failure of some kind inevitably occurs, you will likely never even experience a disruption. Such is the type of redundancies and fail-safes that SaaS organizations put in place. But also, with that shift of responsibility, your team can instead focus additional time on other strategic initiatives with higher business value.

By moving from on-premise WMS to the cloud, you can avoid a potentially devastating business impact while simultaneously optimizing your workforce.

An Infor customer recently found themselves facing an all too familiar story with aging technology stacks. They relied on a legacy on-premises solution for over 30 years. While it had been dependable for decades, the day the system failed, there were no longer any technicians in-house familiar with the solution and no feasible way to recover. The organization realized the only logical step forward in that critical moment was a move to the cloud, which not only allowed them to recover, but has now set them up to scale accordingly as the business grows. In hindsight, it would have been ideal to begin that transition to the cloud years earlier, but they are now benefitting from more than peace of mind.

As warehouse operations grow increasingly complex, making sure your system is always up to date has never been more important to your business. If you want to learn more about the importance of moving your WMS to the cloud, we invite you to download this best practice guide on driving operational excellence in the warehouse.