Renova (Manhattan Associates WMOS) Group

Situation

In 2005 when the Relogix company began preparation for opening of the first warehouse in Moscow 3PL-business in Russia only began to develop. There was an acute shortage of warehouses of class A, and many companies rendering at that time services of warehousing took place in warehouses a class below. However top management made the decision to position Relogix as the company rendering services of a premium class. Therefore from the first day of activity company executives imposed increased requirements to quality and hardware of warehouses. The efficiency of the 3PL-operator first of all depends on speed and the accuracy of work of a warehouse therefore the company extremely carefully approached the choice of a WMS system which had to provide a possibility of storage of large volume of different types of the nomenclature from different owners, the accuracy and speed of shipments, efficiency of use of warehouse spaces.

Choosing a Solution

The main goal which was set before a WMS system – to provide to the company competitive advantages due to providing the high level of service. Therefore a system had to optimize use of warehouse spaces and provide the high accuracy and speed of transactions. Its fault tolerance at an unlimited number of transactions and a possibility of further scaling was one of the main requirements imposed to the solution. Thus further when opening new warehouses the Relogix company had to have an opportunity to independently scale a system without involvement of external providers. It became possible thanks to the Microsoft.net platform.

Solution

The implementation project of the WMS system of Manhattan Associates ILS started in Moscow at the beginning of 2006 with the participation of a command of Corus Consulting. At first the pilot project of a system on the basis of which underwent directly implementation was created. After that passed system testing, personnel training of the customer and a system it was brought into operation.

The solution architecture constructed on the Windows server platform that provided the high performance and fault tolerance of a system was selected. A system was constructed by the principle of three-unit architecture: the database server works under control of the Microsoft SQL Server 2005, a number of application servers for ensuring scalability of a system is provided, work of mobile and stationary clients is provided by terminal services Windows Server 2003.

As a result the company received the system allowing to provide the maximum flexibility at customer interaction. Account of goods is kept on several commodity groups, several accounting units and several parameters (FIFO, SKU, the status, batch code, etc.). Use of the KPI system provided complete transparency of work and gave the chance of providing the qualitative reporting to clients. The description of processes in a system allowed on the discussion course with clients of Relogix company of requirements for processes to offer the correct option of processes and to set the flexible strategy of placement, reservation, replenishment and selection (up to individual algorithms).

Besides, the user-friendly interface which is based on technologies of Microsoft allowed to provide quickly personnel training and to reduce quantity of errors. And detailed accounting of transactions and the transparent reporting – to build the system of motivation of personnel.

Within implementation the following functions were implemented:

Processing of arrivals

• Management of docks
• Acceptance/returns
• Placement

Processing of shipments

• Registration of orders
• Planning of waves
• Routing
• Reservation
• Selection
• Consolidation
• Packaging
• Shipment
• Accompanying documentation

Task management

• Task allocation
• Execution control

Inventory management

• Replenishment
• Inventory
• Processing of goods

Add-on modules

• Management reporting
• Resource management
• Exchange

As the Relogix company has no own ERP system, but works with a large number of customers, each of which has own accounting system, it was extremely important to integrate WMS with the accounting systems of clients. The decision to use Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 technology for such integration was made. Adoption of such solution was promoted by the fact that the Manhattan Associates ILS.NET system is completely constructed on technology base Microsoft that made process of integration much simpler. As a result the company had an opportunity of the maximum integration with the different accounting systems of clients (1C, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, etc.), effectively to transform different formats of data of ERP retailer and WMS of the 3PL-operator, to organize a full stroke of electronic document management, to use the wide list of notifications on change of the statuses of order processing at the expense of what qualitatively to increase the level of service for the client. Besides, such solution allowed the company to save significantly on integration with clients further and to provide flexibility in the course of integration.

Prospects

When time to start work of a new warehouse in St. Petersburg came, the Relogix company made the decision to independently scale a WMS system, using at the same time the uniform data-center which is in Moscow. In November, 2007 the new warehouse managed by WMS Manhattan Associates ILS.NET was brought into operation. In plans of the company – further scaling of a system in again opening warehouses in Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Rostov-on-Don, Samara.