When bringing on a new client, expanding into a new facility, or even opening a micro-fulfillment-based store, it's critical to have the flexibility in your warehouse management system that allows you to flex your operations as needed, says Chris O'Stean, vice president of solutions consulting at Softeon.

A sophisticated WMS has a great deal of configurability and flexibility, and you need to be able to support different types of products, channels and customers, O’Stean says. “You don’t want to have to start from scratch when you’re onboarding that customer. You want to quickly be able to get them up and running, and not have to reconfigure the entire application.”

One key to this is what O’Stean calls “templatizing.” As he explains, that means having a template that is the foundation for the network, but can then be added to as needed. “Maybe, when initially I go live with the WMS, I have, say, two facilities and I develop a global template that those facilities have in common,” O’Stean says. “And then I just layer on top of that what might be unique or different for each building.” Then, with expansion, the same process can be repeated, using the underlying template and adding custom elements on top. “That way, I only have to configure or set up what’s unique about that additional building.”

Having said that, when it comes to micro-fulfillment centers, you can’t take a one-size-fits-all approach to WMS. “You have to understand how much sophistication you want within the store,” says O’Stean. “Are you going to track inventory at the shelf level, or only in the backroom? Iff there is a backroom.” Fulfillment and picking can require different processes too, and you may or may not want to integrate with a point-of-sale system. “The key is to have a lot of flexibility in the system,” O’Stean says.