This is part of my earlier posts on WMS/MSCA sessions at Oracle Open World. Click on Part-1 and Part-2 to view the earlier posts:
Oracle WMS: What is new in Release 12.1?
Aditya Agarkar, Director of Product Strategy
Aby Joy, IT Director, Igloo Products
This type of session has become a standard fixture for any Oracle Open World where Oracle WMS Product Strategy team lays out the new stuff in the product in the last one year. The first 10 minutes kind of covered Oracle’s WMS sojourn from 11.5.8 to 11.5.10 and that was also the opening for the case study on Igloo.
Few things to note about Igloo: it is a hosted WMS and OTM customer running 2 DCs on Oracle. My impression is that Igloo is pretty much using the plain vanilla WMS 11.5.10 release. The only major customization is to generate case labels in WMS prior to ship confirm. I presume they pick full or partial pallets and need individual labels for cases to address the compliance needs of Wal-Mart and other big retailers. We have done similar customizations before and I can tell you that warehouses that do a large volume of case shipments and require individual case markings, this customization is a life saver! This used to be a standard feature in EXE even back when I used to work there. I am happy to report that Oracle has a case labeling feature in 12.1 to address this need. I will post more in detail about this feature.
Another interesting point about Igloo is that they are using OTM along with WMS. I particularly liked Aby’s part in making the OTM work in WMS and skirt some of the integration pitfalls. It’s a great point: you implement the application you have to make it work and not what you could have or should have.
The other less reported but very important feature in Aditya’s WMS presentation was on pick methods especially support for widely used but previously unsupported pick methods such as Pick and Pass and Zone Picking. Both these are very useful techniques to drive pick efficiency. This is especially true if you have a large number of SKUs stored in split case pick zones. Very interesting and powerful features and I promise to blog about it some other day!
Life Fitness Gets Its Warehouse in Shape with MSCA
David Brossette, DSI
Mike Edwards, CIO of Life Fitness
I actually did not attend this session. However from what I hear, this is one of the rapid ROI projects for MSCA. It reinforces what I said earlier, the rapid ROI is tantalizing but reality is that a lot of things must be done right to get fantastic results like Life Fitness.
– Amin Sikander
