ERP or WMS?

The main appointment of WMS consists that a system allows to manage the goods flows passing through a warehouse. It is often possible to face wrong opinion that the accounting accounting program in which the movement is reflected in a warehouse can be sufficient for its automation. Certainly, it not so. As WMS in addition to goods in a warehouse disposes also of its resources – material and human.

In addition to these minimum requirements powerful warehouse management systems have such additional specific functions as customer management (cargo owners), management of traffic flows across the territory of a warehouse.

Some developers WMS offer also add-on modules on purchase management (purchase orders) and to sales management (orders for shipment and delivery).

However if it is necessary to optimize work of a warehouse in the company where there are no difficult business processes in a warehouse, or at the enterprise with a low goods turnover and the limited nomenclature, often there is enough ERP add-on module of the platform (all large vendors have such modules – SAP, Oracle and others).

In this case WMS will be excessive, and close integration of the warehouse module with other modules of a corporate system will be advantage of the choice of such approach.

For big warehouses, distribution centers of retail chain stores and warehouse terminals of logistic operators specialized WMS solutions which need to be selected carefully on the basis of the analysis of the offered functionality are necessary.

At the same time the need for this or that functionality depends on many factors: the size of a warehouse, complexity of warehouse business processes, like the nomenclature, the used equipment, the accounting system and so on.