Top Ten Reasons Why WMS Projects Fail.

I hate David Letterman and his show.  For the most part, I find his show very predictable and unfunny.  (Conan, however, is another story.) Quite frankly, I think for the past few years, he has been resting on his laurels and becoming very unoriginal.  But he and his show didn’t used to be that way.  I used to like him.  And one of his best ideas was the Top Ten Lists.  Very original.  And especially memorable. 

Anyway, last year sometime, I was engaged by a client to do a study.  Sort of a benchmarking study.  And sort of a Top Ten List study.  They wanted to know the top ten reasons warehouse management systems failed to deliver on their results.  They were very serious about this.  I must have talked to several hundred people in the process of coming up the specific reasons.  I must tell you I appreciated their openness, candor and honesty.  (Some of it was pretty gruesome to listen to.)

Special bonus:  Although my client specifically had me focus on warehouse managements systems, I believe there are implications for every type of system which requires substantial procedural rigor and coordination.  See if they don’t ring true for you too:

Top Ten Reasons Warehouse Management System

 Fail to Deliver Their Results

Reason #10: Unrealistic Deadlines.  In those situations that this impacted the project,  people significantly what it took in terms of time and resources to switch over to an automated system.

Reason #9: Company Politics.  Some people took advantage of the new system being implemented and then attached their own agenda to it. 

Reason #8: Automating a Bad Process.  Unfortunately, some companies didn’t understand what was a bad process in the first place.

Reason #7: Trying to Do Too Much at One Time.  This is different than setting unrealistic deadlines.  People who committed this mistake couldn’t coordinate all the different activities that need to happen in parallel for their project/system to succeed.

Reason #6:  Management Lost Their Commitment to the Project Halfway Through.  Priorities change.  Important resources get reassigned. Stuff happens and that which is optional (like continuous improvement projects) get put into suspended animation.

Reason #5:  No Formalized Process of System Implementation.  In other words, people were “winging it”.  They really didn’t know how to implement a WMS and did what they thought a good thing in the moment based upon their previous experience. 

Reason #4: Not Involving the Right People Upfront and On a Regular Basis Regarding the Project and System.  This mistake created confusion, territorial arguments, lack of ownership and commitment at a floor and management level. End result:  People ran away from the effort.

Reason #3: Having False or Unrealistic Expectations.  People tried to achieve too many outcomes at the same time or unrealistic outcomes.  In other words, the gap was too large.  As a result, their progress was laborious, time consuming and ultimately thwarted.

Reason #2: Not Understanding or Having Clarity Regarding Your Requirements.  This mistake created the “Oops!  I forgot…” factor.  Then purchase orders for requesting additional resources started flying.

Reason #1: The User Training Aspect of the Systems Implementation was Underestimated.  Yep, this was the absolute biggest reason.  The prize for committing this mistake was lots of finger pointing, and on average, an extra six months to a year of time and effort being expended to resolve the situations it created.

Although David Letterman would never think of presenting a list like this, I hope you take advantage of the insight and experience of a couple hundred of your peers.  If you want to use this information to your optimum advantage, I think the first thing I would do is invert this list into focusing on the positive, then you’ll have a pretty good idea of what to do to be successful on your project.

I hope this helps and I wish you the best of success with your system.  See you next month…