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Oracle recently announced the availability of the distributed deployment of Oracle’s Warehouse Management System (WMS).  What does this mean? First of all, some clarification is in order. Oracle is not announcing the release of a new product. Instead Oracle has announced that with this release the existing WMS product can also be deployed in a “distributed” mode – i.e. it can be installed on a separate standalone instance. Oracle inventory is the only other e-Business Suite application that you need to install on this separate instance. It is very clear that how you choose to deploy WMS, whether in integrated mode or distributed mode, will have no bearing from a feature or function perspective.  This is good news actually, since you do not need to worry about separate product roadmaps if they were two different products.

This is an important milestone for Oracle WMS and the ability to have a separate WMS instance certainly provides you with a tremendous amount of flexibility. However, you should carefully balance this flexibility with the additional effort needed to maintain a separate WMS instance and its integration with the ERP or host instance. Is the additional instance or integration worth the benefit? Clearly, in a lot of business situations, the additional cost and effort may be worth the extra flexibility and benefits.

1. You are running an older e-business suite release such as 11.5.10. Oracle WMS can be used with any release of e-Business Suite. If you are an 11.5.10 customer and want to use the latest features in R12.1, distributed WMS deployment is an option for you.
2. You have a non-EBS ERP such as PeopleSoft Enterprise, JDE, etc. Oracle WMS can be used with any ERP. You can have Oracle WMS with other applications such as PeopleSoft Enterprise, JDE, etc.
3. You have geographically distributed logistics operations and need a WMS instance for each warehouse. With this change, you can have separate WMS instances for your regional warehouses that are integrated with a central ERP instance.

The flexibility also extends to how you wish to model your organizations.

1. One inventory organization on the host instance is linked to a warehouse on the standalone instance. This is the most likely scenario.
2. One inventory organization linked to multiple WMS instances e.g. one inventory org in your ERP for all the satellite warehouses defined individually in WMS instance
3. One WMS instance associated with multiple ERP instances e.g. one WMS instance supporting one or more inventory orgs (potentially from many ERP instances)

Careful evaluation is needed to choose the right configuration depending upon the context and your business needs. This is important for managing the integration between distributed WMS and ERP. In my next post I will briefly discuss the need for integration and what is Oracle’s approach to integration.

Distributed WMS and Integration

Any standalone WMS requires integration with a host system to carry out material movement and fulfillment execution. More specifically, it needs master data such as items, customers or supplier information. In addition, WMS should get the sales order and purchase order information to perform outbound shipping and inbound receiving activities. You need to make sure that WMS has the master data information that is created and maintained on the host side prior to execution.

For a distributed WMS, the integration needs can be summarized as:

Type	Integration Objects	Direction
Master Data	Item, Supplier, and Vendor	From Host ERP to Standalone WMS
Outbound Logistics	Sales Order (Oracle refers to it as shipment request)	From Host ERP to Standalone WMS
Outbound Logistics	Ship Confirm (Oracle refers to it as shipment confirmation)	From Standalone WMS to Host ERP
Inbound Logistics	Purchase Order (Oracle refers to it as receipt request)	From Host ERP to Standalone WMS
Inbound Logistics	Receipt (Oracle refers to it as receipt confirmation)	From Standalone WMS to Host ERP
Inventory	All inventory adjustments occurring in the warehouse	From Standalone WMS to Host ERP

Basically, the integration requirements are similar to any standalone or best of breed WMS. It also means that the integration effort should be carefully planned to maximize the benefits of your distributed WMS installation.

What about Integration?

Oracle states that distributed WMS comes with an integration framework. What they really means is that they provide a template for integration. Oracle is not providing a certified toolkit for integrating a distributed WMS instance with a host EBS instance. The integration framework is based on Oracle Data Integrator (ODI), which is a component of Fusion Middleware suite to integrate information across databases.

The ODI based integration framework and the integration templates does simplify a lot of steps for a plain vanilla EBS to distributed WMS integration. However you should not expect the integration to be plug and play.  Modifying the ODI integration will be required on most projects and this will require technical ODI skills. In my opinion, it is best to expect that one of the WMS project activities is to determine how well the ODI integration fits with the warehouse requirements. Depending on those requirements, modifications to the ODI integration may be required to successfully implement distributed. In more complex situations custom integration maybe needed especially if you are integrating distributed WMS with an older EBS release or a non-EBS release.

Tags: Amin Sikander, Distributed WMS, Oracle EBS, Oracle WMS, WMS