Overview
In recent years, the supply chain industry has begun a major shift, one that is only picking up speed.
Spurred by the cloud computing boom, warehouse management systems (WMS) are seeing a widespread move from on-premise solutions to software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud-hosted delivery. On top of these changes, new implementation methodologies brought on by the pressures of the pandemic have forced companies to find inventive ways of reducing deployment risk while operating under strict timelines.
With this evolution in mind, how can change management move from something organizations avoid at all costs to something they embrace? Similarly, how does testing turn from an afterthought into an essential part of reducing risk?
What You’ll Learn
- How and why WMS implementations have shifted
- The problem with putting change management and testing on the back burner
- How organizations can embrace innovation through testing solutions
The Shifting Tides of WMS Implementations
The industry-wide pivot to SaaS platforms brings a renewed focus on standard product functionality. Heavy system customizations have long been common. But in the last five years, organizations have turned their focus to staying current and thinking strategically, and both call for a templated approach. Particularly within multi-site deployments, template-based standardization can decrease time-to-value (TTV) and support greater efficiency across networks.
Why the Shift to Standardization?
The ebb and flow between standardization and customization in supply chains is nothing new. It has endured for decades. But the ever-increasing pressure of consumer expectations has supercharged the current move to standardization.
E-commerce giants like Amazon have set new supply chain standards by offering same-day and next-day delivery options, which has made direct-to-consumer no longer optional but essential.
Another factor driving the shift is the recent pandemic-driven reminder that change is the only constant. As a result, the systems supporting WMS implementation need to be not only efficient but also flexible and resilient enough to cope with ongoing change.
Ultimately, software vendors themselves are making some of the strongest cases for standardized solutions simply by shifting their offerings. SaaS-based models require more commonality and standardization so that upgrades can be accepted into the systems more quickly.
Deeply customized systems that vary by site throughout a network can challenge an organization’s ability to make streamlined decisions across the entire business. A templated approach offers access to economies of scale that simply aren’t possible with custom-built processes.
How Executives Are Thinking Differently
If change is the one thing we can count on in supply chains, the burden is on executives, meaning chief information officers (CIOs) and vice presidents (VPs), to solve the problem of keeping their systems up to date. The migration to SaaS-based solutions forces these leaders to think more strategically.
Executives understand that a SaaS platform is a long-term investment rather than a short-term one, and that it will let them stay current and drive efficiency. In the past, organizations may have tried to avoid upgrades as long as possible. The shift toward SaaS corresponds with a desire to implement the features and functionality that come with upgrades. The move to standardized templates also lets businesses better measure performance from site to site and drive greater productivity, where varied processes previously made these outcomes a challenge.
Previously, businesses often engaged in large-scale projects simply to recreate existing processes in the name of perceived efficiency. But such projects often made keeping software updated more difficult for IT teams, which created inefficiency elsewhere.
Today, staying up to date on modern solutions, without fear of introducing change, is essential, because change isn’t optional. Organizations that stick to defensive strategies, avoiding changes and upgrades until they have to make them, will lose out in the long run. Businesses whose leadership teams approach change and innovation on the offensive will win in this evolving world.
Placing greater importance on flexibility, executives are making decisions with a longer-term outlook in mind.
Cutting over to a new system isn’t just a milestone for the Go Live itself. The cutover marks the start of ongoing efforts to ensure that both the system and the business are prepared to adapt over time.
Principles of Change Management
Effective change management has a wide scope that includes defining the project charter, communicating the change, testing, and training. Unfortunately, it’s all too common for organizations to put change management on the back burner. Instead of putting change management at the front end of a project, executives bringing on a new tech stack want to keep a standard product, and then, when the system reaches operations teams, they default to recreating legacy processes.
Bringing in change management during the user acceptance testing (UAT) phase of deployment is too late. Organizations should begin the change management process early, guided by three principles.
1. Start with change acceptance
Prioritizing change management requires a true cultural shift. Change management often starts with building change acceptance among the people in operations who live and breathe the processes every day.
Start conversations with team members, particularly operational veterans, early in the process to help them understand the benefits of upcoming changes. Meet them on the floor where they work each day to understand what the change means for them. This not only helps manage the changes for those in the operation, but these team members often have some of the best insights and ideas for process improvements. Ultimately, people have to come first.
2. Use change to assess existing processes
Implementing any new system is an opportunity to evaluate existing operational processes and compare them to the features and functions of the new system.
Replicating what has always been done means taking the easy way out, but it also significantly limits the potential benefits of rolling out a new system. What’s more, introducing a heavily customized system makes it harder to stay current and gain additional features and functions in the future.
To maximize the positive impact of upcoming changes, consider current processes and evaluate how they can be improved. Be sure to introduce change management at the start of the project so the charter correctly represents the scope of the changes.
3. Bring quality assurance to the table early
The supply chain industry has often seen testing as a mere cost driver and even a necessary evil, but mindsets are changing rapidly. The desire to stay current has elevated the importance of investing in quality assurance (QA) leadership on project teams. In fact, the strongest organizations are giving QA a voice in the conversation as early as possible. Prioritizing QA drives massive returns on investment by avoiding hefty costs and reducing TTV.
The earlier in a project someone can identify testing challenges, and help testing teams understand business processes, the sooner testing infrastructure and automation can be put in place. That’s where organizations can greatly reduce their overall risk.
Working Effectively with Vendors
Introducing change is a challenge for anyone who works in supply chain management, and it can be especially difficult for team members who have worked with particular processes for years. This is why the partnership between vendor and client is critical.
Ensuring that the vendor understands business objectives should be top priority.
Then, the vendor’s role is to match business-critical requirements with the features and functions of the system out of the box and to communicate those alignments to the client.
Vendors should approach these conversations with curiosity and a willingness to dig deeper to fully understand the business’s needs. They also aim to reassure teams that the new processes will deliver the same end results to the customer.
Multiple avenues to achieving business objectives might be available, and they may lead to a change in processes for warehouse teams. But introducing change management early, and having the right individual assigned to explain how the changes will support the business, can ease change and streamline the process organization-wide.
Systems technology exists to support the business, not to run the business and certainly not to introduce unnecessary risk. Workers may default to a “we’ve always done it this way” mentality out of concern about the changes. But everyone wins with a commitment to efficiency, an understanding of the impact of system changes, and a holistic change management approach throughout the project.
How the Move to SaaS Has Changed Upgrade Strategies
While many organizations are focused on transitioning legacy systems to cloud-hosted SaaS platforms, plenty of others still use self-hosted or on-prem software. Most best-of-breed WMSs are now offered in a SaaS model, which means upgrade strategies require careful consideration of environment migration factors. Solution design varies depending on the constraints of the upgrade:
- On-prem to on-prem: This migration is likely a heavily customized solution. Organizations making this upgrade are often several versions behind the latest release, and the top priority is to migrate their current codebase to the new version.
- On-prem to SaaS: Moving from on-prem to SaaS often means reviewing customized processes to question (1) whether they are business critical and (2) whether they can be moved to the SaaS environment. This is more than an upgrade. It’s a new implementation.
- SaaS to SaaS: In this case, an organization is likely already using standard features and out-of-the-box functionality. The process should be much more seamless than other updates and offers the best possible positioning for a staying-current strategy.
In upgrading to SaaS solutions, it’s especially important to challenge existing processes to get the most value from the changes. Cultivating a culture of curiosity starts with asking key questions: Why do we do things in this particular way? Is there a better way to do this? Even if an organization concludes that the existing process is the best way, the team will have lost nothing by using a migration as a chance to improve.
Giving Testing a Leading Role
Outside of resistance to change because of commitment to old processes, another hurdle for innovation in many companies is testing. Changing processes and driving innovation requires a robust testing strategy, which can be difficult, if not impossible, without tools like test automation.
When not properly supported, testing can become a bottleneck. In response, organizations often avoid necessary changes altogether, or they make the changes and try to shortcut essential regression testing. Putting testing in its proper place prevents negative ripple effects and allows for a healthy culture of innovation and change.
All too many organizations minimize testing, citing the mock Go Live as a replacement quality checkpoint: if all goes well during the mock Go Live, then the cutover will go well, right? Then, to their dismay, problems still show up in production.
Conducting mock Go Lives is an important way of reducing risk, but they are just one part of a cohesive quality strategy, and they are certainly no replacement for proper testing. A robust quality assurance strategy involves several pillars.
Testing pillars
- Functional/regression testing helps you gauge whether newly introduced changes will adversely affect existing business processes.
- Performance testing allows you to test for scalability and helps you understand the boundaries of the systems and the application infrastructure that supports them.
- User acceptance testing is essential because nothing can replace the process of having business experts sign off on a system change.
- Mock Go Lives allow for physical testing of the infrastructure, including the physical processes humans will be using after the cutover.
All testing pillars need to work together. They can’t stand in for each other, but each one can strengthen the others. Functional testing can’t replace user acceptance testing, for instance, but it can make acceptance testing more efficient. Similarly, performance testing is no replacement for a mock Go Live. However, running performance tests lets the mock Go Live focus on what it should: the physical test itself.
Both functional and performance testing make other testing stages run more smoothly and effectively, particularly when you use automation to simplify these complex, time-consuming tests.
Looking for shortcuts that minimize testing or push it to the background may seem to save time in the short term, but these approaches lose out in the long run. Prioritizing testing paves the way to organization-wide risk reduction and sets you up for a more successful Go Live.
The Secret to Staying Current
As the trend toward SaaS continues, the key to staying current and having the freedom to upgrade your systems is a standardized solution.
Templated approaches like the one Open Sky Group offers, combined with automated test solutions from Cycle Labs that give testing its proper focus, ensure more stable, accurate, and consistent systems.
Moving forward, the companies that thrive will be those that see quality as a value driver, pursue curiosity during upgrades, and allow testing to drive efficiency. With those priorities, everyone wins.
Contact: cyclelabs.io | +1 (866) 305-3151 | info@cyclelabs.io
